YÜAN DYNASTY GRAVES (see p. [257])
A T'U TI SHRINE, SHOWING RAG-POLES AND TREE
(see p. [377]).
There are traces of a belief of this kind in Japan, and I have observed many proofs of it also in the border country between China and Tibet. There is good reason, I think, to believe that the custom of hanging rags in front of the T'u Ti's shrine has a similar origin. The fact that the rags are usually hung up after the patient has already recovered merely goes to show that the primitive meaning of the act has become obscured.
It is probable that the T'u Ti originally had nothing to do with the matter. Of what possible use to him could be a number of small pieces of ragged cloth, unless indeed he wished to make himself a patchwork quilt? But as soon as the significance of the suspended rag had been forgotten, the idea may very naturally have grown up that the practice was essentially a religious one and ought to be associated with some god: and what god so suitable as the local guardian-spirit—the T'u Ti—whose shrine was always conveniently close at hand, and who was supposed to take a personal interest in every villager? As soon as the rag came to be regarded as a votive-offering the Chinese would naturally select red—the colour of joy and good luck—as most acceptable to the god and most likely to win his favour. This theory will perhaps gain in reasonableness if it is explained that the uneducated Chinese of the north—including Weihaiwei—do actually believe to this day in the possibility of transferring certain diseases from a human being to an inanimate object. They declare that if a sick person rubs a piece of cloth over the part of his body in which he feels pain, and then throws the cloth away at a cross-road,[359] he will feel the pain no more. Wayfarers who see such cloths lying on the road will on no account touch them, as they are supposed to harbour the disease that has been expelled from the human patient.[360] There are similar beliefs in Korea[361] and elsewhere in Asia, and also in several countries of Europe.[362]
To confine ourselves to Weihaiwei, it should be mentioned that the sticks or poles in front of the T'u Ti's shrine to which the rags are fastened are inserted perpendicularly in the ground in front or at the side of the shrine, and are often made to represent, on a miniature scale, the well-known mast-like poles that stand outside the gates of official yamêns and the houses and family temples of the literary "aristocracy." But sometimes the shrine is shaded by the branches of a tree, and in such cases the rags may occasionally be seen hanging on the tree itself. It is possible that here we have something like a blending of three old beliefs or superstitions: the cult of the local tutelary god, faith in the magical expulsion of sickness, and the worship of sacred trees.
Tree-worship is one of the bypaths of Chinese religion. It is not connected, except as it were accidentally, with Confucianism, Taoism or Buddhism. But the bypath is worth exploring if only because it leads to a region of folk-lore and myth that is common to both China and Europe. The idea that certain trees are animated by more or less powerful spirits, or the distinct and still earlier view that certain trees are themselves the bodies of living divinities, is a belief that can be traced to almost every part of the world. It existed in ancient Rome,[363] where the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was an object of popular devotion; it existed among the ancient Jews at Hebron, Shechem, Ophrah and at Beersheba;[364] it existed in Pelasgian Attica and neighbouring regions thousands of years B.C.;[365] it existed in India in pre-Buddhistic and post-Buddhistic times—witness the history of the famous Bo-tree of Anuradhapura in Ceylon, to which pilgrims still flock in their thousands; it flourishes to this day in all the countries of Indo-China; it is to be found in Korea and in many islands of the Pacific; indeed traces of it exist in every part of the world, including western Europe and the American continent. No wonder Dr. Tylor says of "direct and absolute tree-worship" that it may lie "very wide and deep in the early history of religion."[366] Its extraordinary vitality in Europe may be estimated by the fact that though the early Christian missionaries on the Continent and in Britain anathematised it as idolatrous and endeavoured to stamp it out—sometimes adopting the method of cutting down a sacred grove and using the timber for building a Christian chapel[367]—traces of the belief in sacred trees actually survive in popular traditions and local customs up to the present time right across the Euro-Asiatic continent from England and Sweden to China, Malaya and the islands of Japan.[368] Folk-lore has much to tell us about talking trees, and trees that could plead for their own lives when the wood-cutter approached them with his axe. In 1606 Lincolnshire was reported to possess "an ash-tree that sighed and groaned."[369]