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Chinese people believe that every year
there’s one major star deity who is in charge of the fortunes of this year.
Many Hong Kong people are eager to know
whether their deity has any conflicts with the year of the star deity,
whether there’re any conflicts.
If there is a conflict they have to do something to pacify this conflicting relationship.
February 19th 2007 Che Kung Temple, New Territories.
Spin the wheel, beat the drum, shake the sticks ‘til kingdom come.
Smokey blue clouds of hope and prosperity
engulf the city as six million hands light sixty million joss sticks
and twelve million ears strain to decipher soothsayers tones
above the relentless sacred back-beat of sixty thousand factories
playing the pearl river delta blues.
For example the coming event of the lunar new year,
For Taoist believers they will go to a Taoist temple
to perform a small Taoist rites.
To say thank you to those deities who helped them in the past year.
The second objective of course is to pray for good fortune in the coming year.
And the third objective is that if the fortune in the last year was bad
they want to reverse their fortune in the coming year.
Especially in day three of the first month of the lunar new year calendar,
it’s very crowded in Taoist temples.
For your safety
please just light up a small bunch of incense.
Also please hold up your incense while they are burning.
Thank you for your cooperation.
These three days will be big days.
Every year on the second day we come here with the whole family.
Asking something from the god.
Making some wishes for the year.
And then the next year we’ll come again.
Wong Tai Sin.
OK he’s one of our gods.
So many followers.
He could not be upgraded to a god.
But because of so many followers he could.
People come here and they find it comfortable,
and then they believe something,
and then make a wish,
and then, "oh it’s good".
All over Hong Kong there are small temples.
They may have different kinds of gods.
The word belief is a problematic concept,
because belief is something we use in the West from a religious point of view they say.
"Do you believe in God?" "Do you believe in Jesus?"
you would divide the world into believers and non-believers.
With the Chinese religious beliefs, they just are.
You may have some scepticism, you may not be sure how true it is,
or you may wander whether this particular incident is true or not,
or instance is true or not.
But the cultural reality is very very real.
Anthropologists usually divide the supernatural entities in Chinese society
into the gods, ghosts and ancestors.
The gods are usually were humans before,
who had done good deeds,
And they serve as a deity on earth before being reincarnated like everybody else.
Ancestors are of course, everyone has their own ancestors;
people who came before you.
Usually people focus on the patrilineal ancestors.
And then the ghosts are often people who have died before their time,
and are therefore angry because of that,
Or people who don't have descendants to worship them,
and are therefore forced to wander the earth because they're not properly propitiated.