What is the mascot of the Dai people ?

The Dai people regard peacocks and elephants as mascots.

The Dai people regard peacocks and elephants as mascots, and their folk tales are colorful and colorful. The Dai people like to live by the water, love cleanliness, often bathe, and women love to shampoo their hair, so they are known as "the people of the water", and they used to believe in the Southern Upper Throne Buddhism and primitive religions in general.

Expanded Information

The Dai have their own language and writing system. The language belongs to the Zhuang-Dai branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The two kinds of Dai scripts in Xishuangbanna and Dehong, which are now in use, are pinyin scripts, which evolved from Pali script in southern India. The Dai people are not only good at singing and dancing, but also have created a splendid culture, which is especially famous for the Dai calendar, Dai medicine and narrative poems.

The Dai calendar is a solar calendar year, and the month is a lunar calendar month, and the year is divided into three seasons of cold, heat and rain, and the September of every three years is a leap month, which is still commonly used in Thailand and Burma. Dai medicine, together with Mongolian, Tibetan and Viennese medicine, has become one of the four most famous ethnic medicine systems in China.

There are many long poems in the Dai area, such as "Shao Shu Tun and Nangmu Nona", "Lan Jia Xi He", "Allan's Story", etc. The Dai Opera has a history of more than 100 years. Dai opera has a history of more than 100 years. Most of the Dai people believe in Hinayana Buddhism.

The major festivals of the Dai people are the Dai New Year - the Water Festival, the Door Closing Festival and the Door Opening Festival. "The Water Splashing Festival is a traditional festival for the Dai people to celebrate the old and welcome the new, which takes place in the middle of April on the Gregorian calendar. The main activities during the festival are worshiping ancestors, piling up sand, splashing water, throwing bags, racing dragon boats, setting off fireworks and singing, dancing and revelry.

Elephant Worship

The Dai epic of the creation of the world, "Batamaga Hold Shangluo", records that: the god Yingba created heaven and earth, in order to stabilize the heaven and earth, so he created a white elephant "Palm Yuerangwan", which held the sky with its trunk and four big feet to hold down the sky.

There was no day or night between heaven and earth, and there were no seasons of heat or cold, so human beings could not survive in such an environment. So the god Yingba created a god with an elephant's head, Huanma Yuanran, who divided the seasons and the day and night for human beings. From then on, human beings began to flourish in this land.

White elephants were honored as auspicious animals in ancient India, because elephants have great power and gentle nature, in Buddhism has a sacred meaning. According to legend, Sakyamuni Buddha's previous life in the mother's womb, or ride six tusks of white elephants, or as a white elephant shape, showing that Sakyamuni Buddha's previous life, the character of the soft and great power. The six tusks of the white elephant also signify the six degrees in Buddhism, and the four feet signify the four Rudras.

The Dai people, who believe in Hinayana Buddhism, regard the white elephant as a deity, believing that the white elephant brings them favorable winds and rains, abundant harvests, and peace and tranquility. In the Dai region, there is a widely circulated story of the Elephant's Daughter:

In ancient times, a beautiful Dai maiden came to the forest to pick wild fruits, and the forest was full of dangerous obstacles, and the Dai maiden, who kept climbing, was so thirsty that she searched for a pond of water to quench her thirst in a muddy pit by the roadside.

Back home the woman was miraculously pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. When the girl grew up, she wanted to know her own life very much, so she came to the forest once again, and after a lot of trouble, she finally knew that the water her mother drank back then was the urine of the white god elephant, and that's how she came to be from then on. The elephant daughter searched for her white elephant father in the forest and stayed in the ivory room of the god elephant.

One day, a young man went to the forest to hunt, met the elephant girl, in getting along, the two fell in love, married and bred a lot of children. From then on, the Dai people are also known as the descendants of the elephant.

The Dai people in Gengma County, Lincang City, will tie white elephants and learn the movements and dances of the white elephants every time they celebrate and pray for blessings and the Water Festival and other festivals to give thanks to the white elephant god for the Dai people's contribution, and at the same time, the Dai's white elephant dance has been rated as an intangible cultural heritage of Yunnan Province.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia - The Dai People