Is there anything special about the prayer flags?

As far as its external form is concerned, prayer flags can be roughly divided into three types: one is a blue, white, red, green and yellow square towel printed with the teachings of the Buddha and the patterns of birds and animals, which is sewn one by one on a long rope and hung between two hills. Such prayer flags are common in sparsely populated mountainous areas. The second kind of prayer flags are narrow strips of cloth three to five meters long, which are single in color, either white or red. It is printed with the teachings of the Buddha, and one side of the cloth is sewn on a thick warp beam and inserted in front of the hospital. This kind of prayer flag is more common in Gongbulin District. This is the kind of warp beam inserted in the Jokhang Temple Square in Lhasa, but it is more exquisite. The third kind of prayer flags are glittering flags in five colors: blue, white, red, green and yellow, and a main square cloth with a monochrome edge, on which the teachings of the Buddha and the patterns of birds and animals are printed. These banners are hung on willow branches respectively, becoming prayer flags. Such prayer flags can be seen everywhere on the roofs of residential buildings in the ancient city of Lhasa.

As a symbol of good luck, prayer flags need to be renewed every year. You can't just choose a new day. It is based on the Tibetan calendar, and you choose a good day after the first day of the new year in the Tibetan calendar. This morning, all the people in the hospital put on their holiday costumes and gathered on the roof to hold a grand and happy prayer flag insertion ceremony. In Tibetan, this ceremony is called "supporting the old age", which means offering sacrifices to the gods and praying for blessings.

The color of prayer flags is fixed, so we can't innovate casually. Secondly, the arrangement order of each color is strictly regulated, and there can be no mistakes. Because the meaning of prayer flags is very clear, it is not to beautify the environment, but to pray for good luck and prosperity and eliminate disasters.

There are lush sparks on the branches at the upper end of the warp beam, which are composed of five small streamers of different colors. Generally, there are two or three groups of sparks on one side of the prayer flag according to the number of branches. The color arrangement and symbolic significance of these five flags are as follows. The blue banner at the top symbolizes the blue sky; Below the blue banner is a white banner, symbolizing white clouds; Below the white banner is a red banner, symbolizing the flame; Below the red banner is a green banner, collecting green water; The bottom banner is yellow, symbolizing loess or the earth. The arrangement of five colors is the three-dimensional arrangement of objective natural substances, so just as the world of nature cannot be reversed, these five colors cannot be misplaced.

Five colors symbolize five phenomena in nature and are the material basis of life. When nature is peaceful and the weather is fine, the world is peaceful, happy and happy; When there are disasters in nature, there are many disasters on the earth, and there is no peace. People who have lived on the plateau for generations are more sensitive to changes in nature. In order to hope for peace and happiness in the world, we should first hope that nature is disaster-free, so it is wonderful to express this psychological support with five different colors of flags.

In addition to the symbolic meaning of color, there are many Tibetan letters and vivid bird and beast patterns on the banner, which are printed with woodcut. Tibetan is a Buddhist doctrine at first glance. The text directly conveys the meaning, unlike colors and lines, and you can know its content after reading it. Since it is the theory of Buddha, Confucian classics must be inseparable from the theme of compassion and universal salvation. Apart from words, it's hard to say clearly what the Penglong liger map in the four corners and the steed Tuobao map in the middle symbolize, so I read a lot of materials, and Tibetan scholars at home and abroad have some explanations for this in their works, but the most comprehensive and detailed one is Mr. Nankanobu, an Italian Tibetan scholar, who made these images in his book Selected Works of Nankanobu (published by China Tibetology Publishing House). In the word (Longda, Fengqi), (Longda) stands for heaven in five categories: earth, water, fire, wind and sky. The original meaning of this word is big, complete and complete. If it is combined with other phrases to form a noun, for example,. From the root meaning of these nouns, we can see that they have the meaning of big, complete and complete.