Riding the wind of rebirth

"As Elbow said, every snake bites. There is no easy job in this world, only people who seek easy jobs." Old Chi Ri had gotten up early and pointed at the flying squirrels on the top of the cliff and said to Zhou Zhi and the others, "Look at them. How busy they are? Aren't they all the same?"

"Yes, Xiao Miao, none of the things you are doing now are easy. I am overwhelmed just looking at them." Zhou Zhi kept shaking his head: "Even the experts in the department praise you."

“That’s because you help me manage it well,” Mai Xiaomiao said, feeling a little embarrassed by the compliment. “If I were to do both scientific research and management by myself, I don’t know what a mess the lab is in now.”

"Oh, I hear you guys praising each other so early in the morning." Chi Xueli also got up, and when she heard Zhou Zhi and Mai Xiaomiao talking, she came over to tease them.

"You all go wash up, and when you come back and have breakfast, we will open the Sutra Cave."

Breakfast is even simpler, just porridge made from glutinous rice, some bread and kimchi, it’s a simple meal.

After breakfast, Dawei set up the camera and began shooting the subsequent shots of the cave opening.

The mud bricks were taken down one by one and stacked on the side. After a night of aromatherapy and ventilation, the foul air in the cave was basically emptied and the smell became much better.

Before entering the cave, a ceremony must be held first. Lao Chi Ri brought a big white rooster, which was killed now. The chicken blood was used to sacrifice around the cave, and chicken feathers were pasted on the cave entrance. After some chanting and dancing, the ceremony ended.

Afterwards, Zhou Zhi, holding a camera light, followed Lao Chi Ri into the cave first, followed by Chi Xueli and Mai Xiaomiao, and Da Wei finally followed.

The cave was very dry. In addition to the scriptures, some hay to repel insects was piled between the boxes and shelves.

The caves are divided into three parts, connected by a passage in the middle. It seems that they were natural caves at first, and then some human modifications and expansions were made to become the current appearance of one large and two small caves.

The outermost small room is filled with some modern handwritten scrolls, as well as printed materials reprinted locally during the Republic of China and even after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Many of them have deep marks of the times. Most of these books were destroyed and banned twenty years ago, but they have been preserved here.

Zhou Zhi randomly flipped through a few books and found that many of them were works written in Chinese on the study of Yi language, and not all of them were in Yi language.

Books from different periods have different names for Yi language, which Zhou Zhi had discovered when he was collecting information before.

Some books call Yi language "Yiwen", some call it "Cuanwen" and "Weishu". The materials from the Republic of China are the most confusing. Different authors call it "Laowen", "Manwen", "Sanminwen", "Lolowen", "Zijunwen" and "Nasu".

After consulting Lao Chi Ri, I learned that different dynasties had different names. "Cuanwen" was before the Song Dynasty, "Weishu" was after the Yuan Dynasty, and the messy names of the Republic of China were actually more because when scholars conducted in-depth research, they belonged to different Yi ethnic branches, so they adopted the names of each branch.

This system appears to be quite complex.

In addition to this type of printed materials, the most common items stored in the three caves are various handwritten scriptures.

The contents of the scriptures are also very broad. Zhou Zhi does not know Yi language and does not know what they all mean, but many manuscripts have patterns on the upper part and text on the lower part. Just from the patterns, Zhou Zhi can tell that they belong to several categories, including sacrifices, divination, calendar, history, literature, medicine, and mythology.

For example, in sacrifices, the upper part depicts Bimos in colorful clothes, dancing with various ritual instruments in their hands.

For example, in divination, you can see pictures of Bimo leading a cow or killing a chicken, which are all the actions that Zhou Zhi saw Lao Chi Ri practice. History is often drawn together with mythology, such as the imagination of the sacred tree at the beginning of creation, or the pattern of the creation of the world from chaos to the first appearance of water, stars, and five gods holding tools.

The rest have similar illustrations, with a simple and rough style, and only two colors: ink and cinnabar, but the meaning is still expressed very well.

When he entered the second room, Zhou Zhi knew that a big treasure would be uncovered this time.

There are many wooden racks here, on which are placed piles of carefully wrapped cloth bags.

Zhou Zhi took out a red cloth bag and opened it, and found that there were Buddhist scriptures inside, but they were stored in the unique Yi way of collecting Buddhist scriptures.

The format of this type of sutras is relatively large, with a length and width of about 60 to 70 centimeters, and 20 to 30 pages bound into a book. The paper is relatively soft and thin, and the paper quality is still quite rough. After binding, it will be pressed down with a bamboo pole, and then the book will be rolled into a tube around the bamboo pole, and then wrapped with cloth on the outside, and tied up with ropes around the bamboo pole and cloth, and then stacked layer by layer on the wooden frame.

Some bamboo poles have pieces of paper with labels written in Yi language, which should be the titles of books. Some are written directly on the cloth wrapping the scriptures.

However, most of the scriptures had no markings, and many were not even wrapped, but simply spread out in boxes. Zhou Zhi felt a little scalp-numbing when he saw such ancient books, and the work of sorting and cataloging them alone was enormous.

When we entered the innermost and largest cave, the materials piled up here were visibly older, and there were even piles of raw sheepskins.

The ancient Yi people’s techniques for processing hides were not very advanced, and many hides were rotten, with the smell even unsatisfactory by incense.

These are the mysterious parchments.

6◇9◇Book◇Bar

The Yi people are one of the very few ethnic minorities in Chinese history who have created their own written language and are still using it today.

The ancient Yi people led a nomadic life, moving wherever there was water and grass. Cattle, sheep and other livestock were inseparable from them. Therefore, the best carrier of their writing at that time was naturally to write on cow and sheep skins.

The Yi people attach great importance to knowledge and scriptures. This can be seen from the legend that before and after the "flood", the bimos and messengers of gods from various tribes have been focusing on collecting and compiling history and knowledge.

Later, the contents recorded in the parchment books involved various aspects of social life. In this way, they were accumulated from generation to generation, and gradually left behind a vast treasure trove of knowledge.

The Yi people have a saying that goes "knowledge is food, life, and water." They even have two gods in charge of them, Tuzuzuo, the god of knowledge, and Shechidi, the god of wisdom.

Therefore, the Yi people actually worship knowledge as a deity. When a master teaches his disciples or borrows a book to copy, he prepares pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks and other sacrifices to ask the god of knowledge and the god of wisdom to inspect it.

When the ceremony is held, two branches are made from the gallnut tree and inserted into the ground. A gallnut crossbeam is placed on top, and some branches are inserted around the two branches.

Each fork represents a god or a great Bimo of each sect. Then peel the five-fold wood and coptis root and cut them into pieces to burn or scatter, symbolizing the use of gold and silver to pay tribute to them; then add some wine and put some vegetables on the ground, chant the "Offering Wine Sutra" and "Offering Tea Sutra", and pass the book under the horizontal bar.

After such a ceremony, the scripture became spiritual. (End of this chapter)