中西方葬礼文化差异.doc

Funeral Cultural Differences between East and West I will talk about the funeral cultural difference between Chinese and western. If life is a trip, funeral is the end of the long journey. Death for people who believe in reincarnation does not mean the end of life, but the conversion of life. In other world .Funeral is to put the soul of the deceased to the underworld. The funeral ceremony refers to the etiquette of living deal with the deceased, and it is considered the last step of one’s whole life. To Chinese people, death means the emancipation from earthliness. If people die in the house peacefully, when he/she is extremely old, we call his/her funeral ‘white occasion’. As a very admirable way of death that one’s life ends at home without pain and disease is people’s long-cherished wish of lifetime and it’s also the glory of the family. Funeral preparation is ready shroud, coffin and for the dead. In China it’s very important and formal. There is a lot of custom taboos in this step. T he shroud is generally made from cotton. Nobody will like his/her shroud made by fur or silk, because Chinese believe that furs can make people into animals in the other life. Silk is not used to make shroud for it’s Chinese pronunciation ‘duan’ which means bad for the death’s children. The coffin is divided into different grades according to the hardness of the timber, the harder the better. A prerequisite for the implementation of the funeral, obviously, we must determine the person is dead. In China, people will cotton on the person’s nostrils to test whether or not people die. I t is named a fine cotton in The Book of Rites. A fine cotton is much accurate than directly testing by hand and show respect for the deceased. If relatives were sure the person had been dead, everyone started crying. Crying means starting the funeral ceremony. In some place of China, especially in rural, people always open the roof tiles to wish the death go heaven.