Here is an article written by Stanley Koh in observence of Quin Ming.
TODAY, April 5, is Qing Ming, or All Souls' Day. To Hokkien speakers, it is Cheng Beng. Practising Taoists and Buddhists look forward to it, and Chinese Malaysians mark it by visiting the graves of their ancestors, clearing weeds, touching gravestone inscriptions and offering a variety of food, wine and tea at the grave sites.
It can be celebrated as an elaborate family affair, for Qing Ming also signifies a reunion with ancestors, and some clan associations hold special temple events to commemorate it and honour relatives who have passed on, including their distant ancestors buried in China.
Its history stretches back more than 2,500 years into the time of early Chinese civilisation. Legend has it that the festival originated on Hanshi Day (literally, Cold Food Day), a memorial day for Jie Zitui, one of the many followers of Duke Wen of Jin. He had fed the Duke with his own flesh when the latter was starving from hunger while in exile.
It is said that when Duke Wen came into power again, he searched for Jie and set a forest on fire to force his former servant to come out. However, both Jie and his mother were burnt to death in the fire. After that tragedy, it was decreed that on its anniversary, all peasants were not allowed to heat their food with fire. Hence, the day has been called the “Cold Food Festival”. In another version, the Qing Ming festival was started by the Tang Emperor Xuan Zong in 732. It is said that that the wealthy of the time were so lavish in their spending on ancestor- worship ceremonies that the emperor had to formally declare that they be carried out only on Qing Ming day, on the 104th day after the winter solstice or the 15th day from the Spring Equinox, usually around April 5 of the Gregorian calendar.
Indeed, the Qing Ming festival has many names and meanings. It is also referred to as clear (qing) and bright (ming), or simply as Ancestors’ Day or Tomb Sweeping Day.
New doorsteps
Will this cultural practice ever fade away? Unlikely, even with cremation becoming more widespread. Families whose ancestors were cremated instead of buried replace the cemetery visits with visits to the columbarium. Paying respect to ancestors is a very Confucian practice and inseparable from filial piety. The Chinese race, steeped in folklore, traditional values and superstitions, is unlikely to abandon any cultural practice relating to departed spirits. The very thought of neglected ancestors being angry and harbouring ill-will puts fear into the Chinese mind, which places great importance on health and wealth.
In paying respect to their ancestors, most would seek blessings from their departed souls to ensure more wealth, better career positions and status and good health, usually in that order of priority. Periphery to this traditional practice and the significance of its culturally rooted values, more and more Chinese are beginning to open new doorways to their mindsets to ponder on the riddle of death and reincarnation.
In Chinese mythology, many references are to the galaxy of stars, depicting them as gods and deities. Are these gods and deities an evolutionary process of the human stage progressing onto higher planes or dimensions of spirituality?
Sentimental journey
Surely a great shift in human consciousness, regardless of race, will happen when science discovers the secret of death and reincarnation. If death and reincarnation are one—or opposite sides of the coin of phenomenon—what would be the significance of Qing Ming, since the departed ones are on course to new dimensions and, if reincarnated, will gain new personalities on earth? Should we, as the descendants, continue to depend psychologically on our ancestors for blessings of material wealth and physical wellbeing or should we depend on ourselves as individual spirits in the cultivation of spiritual values?
In the Pleiadian Mission (available on YouTube), a Swiss farmer was supposed to have contacted human forms that are far more spiritually evolved than us (called the Plejerans) from the Orion galaxy of the Pleiades cluster of stars, 500 million light years away. It is an unveiling of the mysteries of life and death. We are advised that ancestor worship will not help us to evolve if we are overtly dependent on our ancestors’ blessings. It is a sentimental journey and an expression of gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Our ancestors, like us, are on the path of a human evolution. Each of us is embarking on a spiritual journey for which we must take the first step. We cannot piggyback on their backs and nor can our children piggyback on us in a spiritual journey to higher dimensions of existence, a journey that will take some 60 to 80 billion years in our human evolution.
Many of our ancestors could have reincarnated and gone on to new worlds of existence in the natural order of human evolution. “Rebirth (reincarnation) is not merely a speculative, philosophical theory. It is a fact and can be proven through logic,” the Plejerans told Billy Meier in an UFO contact in a Switzerland mountaintop homestead as early as 1975. “All human beings will repeatedly incarnate on earth (regardless of whether one willingly acknowledges this or not), and in their rebirth they will re-enter the precise world they helped shape in the past. “And it matters little whether their assistance in shaping the world was active or passive, destructive or constructive.”
The Plejerans, highly spiritually evolved humans, who first contacted Billy Meier, are from the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters in ancient Chinese astrology dating back to 2,300 BC. This star cluster, consisting of more than 400 mostly faint stars along with 6 to 15 brighter stars in the southern hemisphere, can be seen well with the naked eye when viewing conditions are right.
