Books about taboos

When we sort and read ancient books, we often find that there are some broken words, some lines are blank, and some words and sentences are obviously unclear and difficult to understand. In addition to errors in engraving, these situations are generally caused by taboo avoidance.

The so-called taboo means that in the feudal era of China, in order to respect the monarch, the monarch's relatives, saints, sages and elders, they did not call them by their names when speaking, and did not write them literally when writing articles, but used A custom of replacing other words or words. This custom originated earlier, at least in the Zhou Dynasty. According to the "Gongyang Zhuan" record, an important principle of Confucius's "Spring and Autumn" is "to keep taboos for the venerable, to keep taboos for relatives, and to keep taboos for sages". Later, after a long period of application in the feudal dynasties, this custom was constantly updated, and more and more places needed to be avoided. In addition, the emperors of many dynasties themselves stipulated some scope and methods of avoiding taboos. Make people have to use it, otherwise they will be beheaded as punishment. Therefore, the taboo at this time is far from being a matter of custom, but has become a kind of law. There are many people who have been beheaded for thousands of years for violating the principle of taboo. For example, in the Qing Dynasty, Jiangxi Juren Wang Xihou and others violated taboos when writing letters to Emperor Qianlong and were killed. Later generations summarized the matter into two sentences, saying: "Wang Juren wrote a letter with good intentions, but the nerd's body is in a different place."

There are many ways to avoid taboos in ancient books, the main ones are as follows:

1. Lack of writing. It is to write the characters that should be avoided incompletely, but to write one or two strokes less. For example, in order to avoid taboos about the words "世" and "民" in the names of Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, the word "世" was written as "" and the word "民" was written as "". For another example, in order to avoid the taboo of the word "Qiu" in Confucius, the word "Qiu" was written as ""; to avoid the taboo of the word "kuang" in Song Taizu Zhao Kuangyin, the word "kuang" was written as "" and so on.

2. Remove words. It is to remove the words that need to be taboo and not write them in the book. There are two ways to do this: one is not to leave it blank; the other is to leave it blank. The so-called not leaving blank, for example, the current Xia County was originally called Xiaqiu County, and Gong County was originally called Gongqiu County. In order to avoid the taboo word "Qiu" for Confucius, the word "Qiu" was removed, so they became Xia County and Gong County. To leave it blank means to remove the taboo word but leave it blank. For example, in order to avoid taboos about the word "世" (shi) used by Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, people in the Tang Dynasty wrote "Wang Shichong" as "Wang Chong". Later calligraphers did not know that this was caused by the taboo, so when engraving books, they combined the two characters to form "Wang Chong". If you understand these situations, you will make a joke. In addition, there are some books that leave the words that need to be avoided blank, but write the word "Shangtao" in them. For example, in "Shuowen Jiezi", the words "Xiu", "Zhuang", "Hu", etc. are all written with the word "Shangtao". Character. The empty words are not noted. This is because Emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han Dynasty was famous for Xiu, Emperor Ming was famous for Zhuang, Emperor Zhang was famous, and Emperor An was famous for Hu.

3. Change the wording. It is to rewrite the words that need to be avoided into other words. This is the most common method. Due to taboos, not only many people's surnames and names have been changed, but also the names of many things have been changed. Here are some of them:

1. Changing surnames. Nowadays, many people have the surname Qiu. In fact, these ancestors with the surname Qiu were not originally named Qiu, but Qiu. Qiuyuan is a place name, which is the surname named after the place named Linzi (anciently called Yingqiu) in Shandong Province (King Wu of Zhou named his hero Jiang Ziya here. After the establishment of Qi State, all the descendants of Jiang Ziya who lived in Yingqiu were named after the place). The surname was Qiu). At the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, Confucius was promoted as a "sage". In this way, the surname Qiu was the same as Confucius