Like many other ethnic community groups, the Ha Nhi ethnic group attaches great importance to the funeral rite because they consider the dead to live in another world.
Important work in the funeral
According to customs, after the parents died, the family had to break the ancestral altar and remove the side door in the corner of the house, the bedroom door and take the dead to the shroud outside, not to go through the main door of the house. the house and must cover the kitchen so that it cannot be seen. If the kitchen ghost sees the dead, it will bring bad things to the family. After shrouding the deceased, the coffin is placed in the next compartment of the house, head towards the recently broken altar, many corpses are covered like a nest, have to wait until good time, a good day. buried. Good hours often coincide with the time when the dead stop breathing, because the people believe that if they do not bury in the good time, the good day, the dead will be reborn, reincarnated into ferocious animals, returning to harm their families and villages. .
One of the important tasks in the funeral is to prepare offerings, the Northwestern region often offers grilled chicken, meaning that the chicken does not cut and only plucked feathers, then Lao Cai offers chicken to leave feathers (after cutting the blood). ) same tube of rice. During the funeral procession at home, boys and girls have to take turns standing by. Daily offering of rice is not done here but in the nave, but also offers a few offerings and places them at the top of the coffin for the dead to enjoy. The corpse is placed in a coffin with a large hollowed-out trunk, often using cedar, giraffe, fatwood to make coffins, with tight lids. The gap between the lid and the body is closed with beeswax or mud.
Select the soil with the egg
Ha Nhi people do not have the common graveyard of the village. According to custom, the choice of burial ground depends on the soul of the dead, according to the concept, the soul of the dead is present in the egg that descendants bring to choose buried land. According to Mr. Ly A Ho in Huoi Luong commune, Phong Tho district, Lai Chau province - Ha Nhi artisan about living in Vietnam National Village for Ethnic Culture and Tourism, the process of finding this land takes a lot of time. time and effort, the Ha Nhi believe that the soul of the dead person enters the egg, so the broken egg means that person would like to choose that land. There are many families who have just found the land but there are also families who have to go for days, through many mountains but still have not found a good land, even tired of family members throwing eggs on rocks and eggs still do not break.
Choosing the land and then burying it must also be done carefully according to customs. The Ha Nhi people are very reluctant to fill the ground and fall to the acupressure grass, which is the concept of yin and yang, the fresh grass symbolizes life, life is not "in common" with death, without fence. roosting or erecting tombs, compatriots customarily arranged stones around the tomb from the middle of the grave downwards but they did not build a funeral house. The night of the burial depends on the place where people often screen the ashes in the door or in the old sleeping places of the dead to base on the signs printed on it to guess what the deceased will turn into.
Some taboo
In the Northwest, people do not bury their dead in the rainy season from June to August, September of the lunar calendar for fear that the dead will turn into tigers of killing people and cattle in the village. If any house died during the above months, it was customary for them to hang a coffin in a grave. Vented landfill, tent on top of rain and sun. Sometimes people just put the coffin on a truss (roofed or roofless) about 1m - 1.5m high erected in the forest, and then be buried before the end of the rainy season.
The Ha Nhi people abstain from burying the dead on the first day of every month because according to the people's opinion, that day is the odd day the moon rises. If buried in those days, the dead will revive not only the whole body but only every part of the body like limbs ... and that's a threat to the people.
Not only Ha Nhi people but also many other ethnic communities attach great importance to rituals of taboos in funerals, Vietnamese people respect burial rituals, Central Highlands people have Po thi festival ... all rituals. It all shows the profound humanity of the living for your loved one to the afterlife.
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