by Jim Goodman
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| ornate Tày coffin for the soul of the deceased |
Đống Danh
village, in Yên Nỉnh commune, straddles the main road north out of
Thái Nguyên city, just a few km short of the provincial boundary with Bắc
Kan. It lies on a small but flat plain, bounded by wooded hills. People live in rectangular wooden
houses, usually stilted, with thatched or tiled roofs. The interior is a long open room, with both
the separate bedroom for the elders and the kitchen at the far end and a small
ancestral altar room off to the side.
A raised plank lies along the widow side, where the guests sit when
received. Underneath the floor is
the storage space for threshing machines and other farming tools, while in the
back sits a shed used for roasting tea leaves.
It is a typical settlement of
the Tày people, Vietnam’s largest ethnic minority (1.7 million), who live in
scattered, separate valleys and foothills throughout the provinces north and
northeast of Hanoi. They speak a
language of the Tai-Kedai linguistic group and are closely related to the Nùng in
Vietnam and the Zhuang in China. They
have interacted with their ethnic Vietnamese neighbors for
centuries and have adopted much of their lifestyle and customs. They retain a strong sense of ethnic
identity, though, mainly manifested in their traditional religious
beliefs. Like the Vietnamese, they
venerate ancestral spirits and local tutelary deities, but their general
orientation is Taoist rather than Buddhist.
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| Taoist paintings displayed for the funeral rites |
Compared to the ethnic
minorities of their neighbors in the hills, the Tày traditional clothing is
rather plain. Most Tày women dress
in dark, sedate colors and wear plain jackets over trousers or long skirts,
with little or no embellishment in the form of ornaments or embroidery. One doesn’t go to a Tày village to
photograph women wearing exotic colorful clothing. And anyway, in Đống Danh nobody, male or female, wears
traditional clothing anymore.
Đống Danh is not a remote
village. It is on a highway to a major,
modern commercial city. Culturally
speaking, assimilation accelerates on the roads well traveled. Other than living mostly in stilted
houses and not ones on the ground, the villagers’ everyday life hardly differs
from that of Vietnamese villagers in Thái Nguyên. The major exception is that this Tày village has shamans, a
traditional office disappearing elsewhere in the North, not only among the Tày. And while Đống Danh villagers may or
may not call upon his services for dealing with inexplicable illnesses or
divination, which are shamans’ roles elsewhere, they do use the shaman for the
most important of all life rituals—the funeral, and especially the dispatch of
the soul of the deceased to the afterworld.
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| ritual offerings at the funeral |
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| the shaman on a circuit of the casket |
The Tày divide funeral
ceremonies into two parts. The
first is for the body, which generally follows Vietnamese burial customs. The second is for the soul, where the
shaman officiates, dressed in colorful garments, in an environment garnished
with religious paintings and other artful adornments; an explosion of aesthetic
splendor, as if compensating for the drabness of unembellished traditional
clothing and the dearth of house decorations.
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| writing messages to the gods |
In addition to the coffin for
the corpse, relatives of the deceased also construct a special coffin for the
soul, which the Tày believe remains in the area for ten days after the burial
of the body. Kept in a separate
shed used only for this purpose, the typical coffin is about three meters long,
one meter wide, with three tiers, the upper one topped by three separate roofed
pagodas. Colored paper and tinfoil
covers the exterior, dominated by magenta, gold, pink and blue. Several Taoist paintings drape over the
sides and a strip of white cloth lies across the top. Other Taoist paintings are mounted on
the wall behind and above a small altar to the left of the casket.
These paintings are similar to
those used by the Dao and Nùng ethnic groups, as well as Vietnamese and Chinese
Taoists. Rectangular in shape,
suspended or mounted vertically, they depict an array of saints, sages, warriors,
judges and guardians; part of a vast pantheon of Taoist deities and
intercessors that can be called upon to guard and guide the soul in this
dangerous ten-day intermediate period from the burial of the body to the
dispatch of its soul to the Land of the Ancestors.
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| praying over the spirit pole before it goes up |
Because the tradition of Taoist
paintings is quite ancient, the style has become more or less fixed over the
centuries. The original artists
followed common standards in portraying the individual sages, saints and
such. But the purpose of
displaying the paintings during rituals is not to add art to the environment,
although that’s a kind of side effect, but because the shaman will use his
powers to invoke the aid of the figures in the paintings on behalf of the soul
of the deceased.
For this purpose he
will wear special clothing embellished with embroidered figures of more or less
the same as those of the portraits in the paintings. The garment used for most rituals is a golden silk coat,
three quarter-length sleeves, side-fastened, split at the waist and reaching to
the knees. It is open from the
waist down and the two long panels hanging in front sport large Taoist
deities. Three small deities are
stitched across the chest and a large group of them adorn the back.
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| praying while wearing both ceremonial coats |
For some rituals the shaman
wears a second jacket on top of the first one. The extra jacket is short-sleeved, more like a cloak, black
with a red border, and completely covered with brightly colored, embroidered
rows of saints and deities, dragons, phoenixes, lions, warriors on horseback,
Chinese characters and a pagoda.
On some occasions he may wear a hat with a dragon and a moon embroidered
on the front and phoenixes on the back.
Other times he will wear a conical hat or even a baseball cap, both
unembellished.
The average mourner at the
funeral will not be able to identify the deities and personalities depicted in
the paintings and on the shaman’s clothing. They are aware of their purpose and in the first several
days of the transition period will make their own private supplications to
these protectors. But they do not
need to know the names or the methods required to obtain their support. That is the role of the shamans. And on the ninth day they go to work.
Rituals commence from
mid-morning at the shed housing the soul’s coffin. A portrait of the deceased sits on the ground next to the
casket, flanked on one side by ritual offerings of food and liquor and on the
other by a seated diviner, who tosses sticks and interprets how they lay when
they fall. An assistant shaman,
dressed in ordinary clothes, sits beside him and recites prayers from a Chinese
text. The officiating shaman,
wearing his golden ceremonial coat, sits with his ritual paraphernalia to the
right of the casket.
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| rites beside the soul's coffin |
At the end of each circuit,
back at the starting point, he reads from a prayer book held open by an
assistant and for a few rounds also drapes the ceremonial cloak over his shoulders. Mourners, meanwhile, bring offerings to
place beside the photograph of the deceased, such as the head of a pig and a
bowl of cooked rice. Action at the
casket only concludes after a couple of hours. Then there is a break until late afternoon.
The program continues at a small
altar erected in the yard several meters from the shed. Here a junior shaman, also dressed in
ceremonial coat, carries out a series of rituals involving recitations from a
book and various hand gestures, with or without the dagger. Beside him sits a scribe writing
messages to the other world. Meanwhile
people move the soul’s coffin out of the shed to a mound nearby.
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| spirit figure |
The next event is the
erection here of the four meters-long bamboo spirit pole. While the pole lies
on the ground the lead shaman slowly paces the length of it, bent over to read
from scriptures held by the assistant, the family mourners right behind him, as
musicians to the side of it play cymbals, gong, horn and drum. When he reaches the top he recites more
prayers, accented with stylized hand gestures, and then the mourning party
erects the pole, just in front of the casket.
A fringed umbrella crowns the top of
the spirit pole and two long decorative banners hang down nearly to the ground.
The shaman, now wearing both of the ceremonial robes, grips
the banners while he recites prayers from a text held by the assistant. At one point the sons and daughters of
the deceased prostrate themselves behind the shaman, with the eldest son
grasping the shaman’s feet.
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| the soul's final procession |
At the same time, relatives prepare the casket for its
eventual removal, setting it upon the bamboo carrying poles. They adorn its corners with pennants,
bundles of straw and flowers. They
remove the offering tray with the pig’s head, rice and liquor from the small
outdoor altar to the ground in front of the casket. They also affix crude paper cutouts of spirits or guardians
to bamboo poles on both sides of the offering tray. After finishing the rites at the spirit pole the shaman makes
a last stop at the casket to perform another ritual beside the offering tray.
Just after sunrise the
following day, the tenth since the burial of the body, the mourners and shamans
assemble at the mound for the final act of the funeral—taking the soul’s coffin
to the cremation ground. As the
bearers lift up the coffin and proceed along the route, the bereaved family
members crouch in a file in front of it so that the coffin passes directly over
their heads. Musicians lead the
way, the shaman behind them, after him the one bearing the spirit pole, followed
by the coffin, its upper tiers now wrapped in black cloth, and behind it the
crowd of mourners.
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| final prayers on behalf of the soul |
The stately procession marches
along the road for about 1.5 km north, then turns on to a trail that leads to a
clearing on the slope of a wooded hill.
The bearers place the casket on the ground, remove the black cloth
around it and plant the spirit pole behind it.. The shaman dons his second ritual cloak over the first
and begins a last prayer session.
This one is not so long, though, and soon the bearers set fire to the
casket. As the flames lick around
it, they pile on dry brush to accelerate the process. In scarcely twenty minutes the once splendid casket is a
pile of ashes. Only the spirit
pole remains. The prayers
cease. The funeral party returns
to the village, secure in the belief that everything proper has been done to
insure a successful send-off of the soul.
The atmosphere throughout
these two days is quiet, reverent and respectful, free of any emotional
outburst of grief or lamentations.
That may have occurred during the burial ceremonies, when the shock of
the finality of death was more recent a realization. But by the final ceremony the focus has shifted towards
insuring a proper departure for the soul.
All those seemingly tedious and repetitious rituals are necessary to
enlist the help of guardians and good spirits to keep the soul on the right
path and not be doomed to a bad afterlife. One may not feel in need of them while alive, but at death they
are critical to success. For the Tày,
it’s important to have a good life of course, but even more important to be
sure to have a good death.
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| Fire begins consuming the soul's coffin. |
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