著者

魏郁欣

雑誌

東洋学報 / The Toyo Gakuho

巻号頁・発行日

vol.97, no.1, pp.63-93, 2015-06

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The present article discusses the meaning of burial site geomancy (fengshui 風水) among the lineage organizations of Fujian Province during the Qing Period through an examination of perceptions regarding commemorative trees (fenshu 墳樹), planted on the burial site of ancestors, in a case study of the well-known Guo Family of Fuzhou.The research to date focusing on the lineage organizations of the region of Hua'nan, including Fujian and Guangdong Provinces and their fengshui-related burial customs has shown that in the process of erecting their ancestral tombs, trees were often planted on the sites and has interpreted this practice as preserving the burial site's fengshui balance to an extent of the trees' indispensability to maximizing the fengshui practical effect.In testing such an interpretation, the author investigates the recognition of fenshu by the Guo Family of Fuzhou, a lineage organization which produced a large number of successful civil service examinees during the latter half of the 19th century and was widely recognized as one of the region's elite families, reaching the following conclusions.To begin with, for the Guos, the planting of fenshu not only preserved the fengshui balance of their burial site, but also acted as a physical representation of burial site fengshui itself.As the result of proactively manipulating the symbolic character of fenghui based on the perception that "good" fengshui practices would symbolize prosperity for the family, while "poor" fengshui practices would represent a symbol for its decline, the Guos' existing status as an elite family continued to spread to every part of Fuzhou society, and enabled local residents to reaffirm before their own eyes the growing authority and prestige of the Guo Family.That is to say, working within the proactive involvement of the Guo Family in burial site fengshui-related practices were 1) the idea that fengshui itself was the direct cause of such worldly benefits as material prosperity, the birth of many sons and success on the civil service examination and 2) a way of thinking that through the symbolic nuances of fengshui and people's reaffirmation of them, the worldly benefits of prestige and authority would be indirectly enhanced.Therefore, through an examination of the relationship between lineage organization and fengshu in the case of the Guo Family of Fuzhou, the author points to the necessity of paying attention to the two aspects of the "practical effects" and the "symbolism" of fengshui.