Connotation and significance of the Mid-Autumn Festival

The connotation of the Mid-Autumn Festival is reunion, and the significance is the inheritance and promotion of traditional culture.

1. Connotation of the Mid-Autumn Festival

Since the Ming Dynasty, the Mid-Autumn Festival has been endowed with the connotation of "reunion", which is why it is also called the "Festival of Reunion". The concept of reunion is an important spiritual connotation of Chinese culture. The full moon in the sky and the reunion on earth are the goal of people's life, and it is a human realm that the Chinese people are especially pursuing. The Mid-Autumn Festival, which symbolizes reunion, and its seasonal food, mooncakes, are undoubtedly one of the most important carriers, and in the long history of folk activities and cultural inheritance, people's sense of reunion centered on the concept of "family" has been constructed.

2, the significance of the Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional festival in China, which plays an important role in the inheritance and promotion of traditional culture. The Mid-Autumn Festival, together with the Spring Festival, Qingming Festival and Dragon Boat Festival, is known as the four major traditional festivals in China. Influenced by Chinese culture, the Mid-Autumn Festival is also a traditional festival in some countries in East and Southeast Asia, especially among local Chinese.

Origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a festival born from the moon. As early as in ancient times, when our ancestors looked at the moon in the vast sky, they could not help but have some magical associations with the marvelous images in the moon, which led to the formation of a number of myths about the moon, the most famous of which is the myth of "Chang'e running to the moon".

"Chang'e Runs to the Moon" is a combination of beautiful moon, beautiful people and beautiful scenery, and is the result of mankind's beautiful imagination of the moon with primitive thinking. This legend is widely spread in folklore, and directly contributed to the formation of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is a festival of the year, shrouding the festival in a fascinating and magnificent luster and adding a strong poetic meaning.

However, the real source of the Mid-Autumn Festival is the ancient autumn ritual of moon worship in China. In farming societies, the development of agriculture is closely related to the seasons and weather. In the era of underdeveloped science and technology, in order to pray for a good harvest, people often have to sacrifice to the gods of the land, spring sowing when the "spring prayers" custom, until the fall grain maturity report on the harvest there is the "autumn report" custom.

In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period of the "Guoyu - Zhou language", there are "ancient, the first king has the world, and Chongli in God, Ming God and worship, so there is the sun, the moon in the evening in order to teach the civil king" records. Three Kingdoms period, Wu historian, scribe Wei Zhao note that "the spring equinox towards the sun, the autumn equinox, the moon", which is the "moon" is the ancient emperor of the moon rituals.

From this, we can see that the real correspondence between autumn and the moon is the royal sacrificial ceremony. The rituals of moon worship and sacrifice at the autumnal equinox directly reflect Chinese culture's worship of the moon and the wisdom of the Chinese calendar in skillfully combining seasonal transitions with farming.

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia-Mid-Autumn Festival