Dragon Gods, Land Spirits; the Hakka

Let's ask my dad. Oh my gosh, my face does not move in the ways that it needs to move to say that correctly. Oh my, that's so wrong. Oh my god, Hakka people do not kill me. I'm Hakka on my dad's side and per patriarchy technically I would only claim Hakka descent and none of the Niinan that's my mom. Even though culturally I identify so much more with Niinan heritage than Hakka but that's a story for another time. I didn't know about this religious practice and I am ashamed I didn't know about it and that is the traditional religious federation But it's also not exactly veneration. It's more like a belief that the land formations we occupy are dragon spirits. The soil is the dragon god's flesh, stones and rocks are the dragon's bones, and the vegetation, the forests, represent the dragon's hair. Reverence for dragons is certainly a very ubiquitous thing across Asia and it's kind of a very very popular belief system among East Asians overall. But here's the thing, if you know anything about Asian dragons already you might be confused by the elemental association. Typically in Asia dragons are associated with water, with the seas and with the winds that carry the water inland, the rain. Not with earth. That's the part that makes the Hakka tradition a bit unique. Tu di longshen, tu di yongshen, is mountainous or rugged hill terrain meets rivers or bodies of water personified as a dragon god of the earth. Just as you honor your ancestors and your patron gods you also need to honor the dragon god who is the land you are occupying. You are basically standing on top of a dragon god. If you dig that ditch you're digging into the dragon god's flesh. Cut down hectares of forest and you're cutting the dragon god's hair. Just like you have chi life force, the dragon god has chi life force that you can harness. If the dragon god likes you, you'll be blessed and protected by the dragon god's chi. And that chi life force is harnessed through dragon veins, longmai. In traditional Hakka homes underneath the ancestor altar on the ground you will probably find a big pot of incense. I remember this. I've seen this before. There are a couple of talismans or spirit tablets placed around the big dusty pot of incense but honestly I never paid attention to what was written on them. The thing on the ground apparently is in honor of the Hakka peoples. Oh it's a t sound not d. How many people watching this understood that? My point exactly. It's a dying language. So sad. You may also hear of a veneration of Tutigong, a tutelary earth god who is associated with dragons. Sometimes tigers. I know it's confusing. The incense pot, often designated as the incense throne of the earth dragon spirit, is positioned in such a way so as to intercept the flow of mountain and water chi from auspicious dragon veins in the land. The ancestor altar that sits atop this incense pot drawing chi from the dragon veins to the home blesses occupants with the positive good vibes of the chi from the dragon veins. Quick sidebar. Tutigong is not one god and it's not necessarily capitalized as a proper noun. It's a generic reference to the local specific land spirit who governs the specific region where you live. So I'll say Tutigong and mean like the governing land spirit of the land I am physically occupying right now as I sit here and then you might say Tutigong but we're not talking about the same spirit. Your Tutigong is the land spirit governing where you live. How I would need to honor my Tutigong is going to be very different from how you might need to honor your Tutigong. Let's see if we can pictorialize the hierarchy of land spirits you would want to make nice with. Outlined on screen would be the dragon god, identifiable by the mountain range and river. Tutigong is the faction general or duke who governs this specific plot of earth, this particular section of the dragon god. Tutigong is one name often used for the regional tutelary land spirit. Then there are the di zhu shen, the spirits that inhabit the area where you live, where you've made your home. These specific identities, even the so-called shall we say species or types of spirits that occupy the area you physically occupy are unique to your dwelling place. There are also spirits localized to rivers, lakes, and significant bodies of water who are also occupying parts of the dragon god. It's a whole ecosystem of spirits of different hierarchies and rankings and types all occupying the same space together. You've heard me remark before how without context it's hard to tell whether a noun in Chinese is singular or plural. When you see shen, and I don't give you any other context, you don't know if that's god in the singular or gods in the plural. Long, is that one god or are there multiple dragons? This isn't going to be the easiest concept for me to explain so please forgive me if I do a shoddy job at it. At its core, one mega dragon is also equal to five directional dragon spirits corresponding with east, west, north, south, and center. The theology of dragon gods mixes with feng shui geomancy because the dragon god is the land itself, at least in manner of speaking. If you're familiar with compass school feng shui, then what you're seeing on screen is going to be vaguely familiar. Take what you know and then add dragon gods. And if you consider how most Asian societies are collectivist, one is all, all is one, and not to mention how one god equals a triple god or even four directional gods or five or eight. It kind of makes sense why linguistically it was not deemed that important to distinguish singular versus plural in a noun. Even the scriptural texts of Taoism, the I Ching, the Tao, the Jing, and the Zhuangzi, you get recurring references to one is the myriad beings and the myriad beings is one. I just think it's so fascinating how language construction reflects a society's culture and values because we are more collectivist and also our religions tend to be one god equals five gods, which is also equal to eight gods, and also eight is nine, nine is three, and three is one. One word, shen, encapsulates both the concept of a singular spirit and the myriad multiple emanations of that spirit. We would need language that covers both the concept of many and the concept of one at the same time contemporaneously in one word because that reflects our cultural and religious values. But back to the dragon gods. Hua Tai, or I should be speaking Hakka here, is a Hakka traditional ritual of drawing the dragon veins into the home so that the household will receive the blessings of the dragon god or Chu Di Feng through these dragon veins. It's kind of maybe like making sure your house is plugged into the dragon god. This ritual, Hua Tai, is what ensures the stability and prosperity of the home. When you are settling onto new land, a priest, daosi, or a priestess, performs a ritual for your house that invites in the dragon spirit, then leads the dragon spirit, and placates or calms the dragon spirit. The Hakka people's ritual practices and veneration of the earth dragon gods can be sourced back to the Book of Rites, also known as the Rites of Zhou, dated to around 770 to 220 BCE, during a time of intense political turmoil when, according to Hakka legend, is when the first Hakka clan was ousted out of northern China and cast away, forced into exile. And the Hakka have been people in exile, nomads ever since. Hakka, kejia, is basically a nicer way to call someone an outsider. It means, hey, you're just a visitor in these lands, a traveler just passing by, and on your way out, bye. So we're nomads because we haven't been welcomed anywhere we've been. Everywhere the Hakka go, they get booted out, so they constantly have to migrate from place to place. There were also several genocides throughout Chinese history where there were these large-scale efforts mobilized to try and wipe out the Hakka people, but water under the bridge, I say. Historically, the Hakka were not welcomed to cohabit in the fertile flatlands with the other Chinese and were pushed up into the rugged, rocky mountains and hills, especially where the land was not as fertile and harder to till, where the soil just wasn't as good, and where the landscapes were often dense with forests. But the Hakka people persevered and prevailed. Okay, now we're getting into the stories we Hakka kids were told. So I don't know how historically accurate they are. I'm just sharing with you what we get told. So the Hakka grew tea on the mountains. This is Taiwan. Excelled at mining and forestry, other parts of Southeast Asia, and in Asia itself, and became quite successful despite being cast out into the unwanted terrain. And then, seeing the Hakka flourishing, the Han got jelly and came to take the lands we had cultivated. So we were constantly booted from place to place, hence being forced nomads. Here's what I'm wondering. Were the Hakka so successful with cultivating otherwise difficult, mountainous, rocky, and forest-covered terrain because of their veneration of dragon gods, which endowed them with a keener understanding of dragon veins? An industry that the Hakka became extremely successful at and associated with is mining. Did their understanding of dragon veins help with that? And maybe our people developed a clan-exclusive relationship and communion with the dragon gods of their lands and are dialed in to this very specific pillar of Dragon Qi. The concept of dragon veins is a methodical system of identifying ways you can work productively with mountain and river ecosystems. You know how sometimes a haircut is fantastic and you love it, and other times, if someone tries to touch your hair, you're like, I'm going to kill you? Same for the dragon god. So, veneration of the dragon god of the earth is all about making sure anything you do to the land, anything at all, is done in a way that does not offend the dragon god, or 土地公. Personally, I love the core values of this practice. Think about the level of respect these beliefs nurture in a people in terms of our relationship with nature and environmentalism. You take what you need and no more, because if you get greedy, you will piss off a dragon god. And who wants to piss off a dragon god? If you believe the land you're occupying is sentient, then those rocks are the bones of a you dig into the dirt, you're digging into the dragon god's flesh. When that is your sincere belief, you are naturally going to be a lot more reverent with how you interact with the land. Here's why I think we are having this conversation. I have a strong feeling that if you're kind of even a little bit spiritual and intuitive, then a lot of this already resonates with you. Maybe not literally the hills behind your house is a giant dragon because it's the 21st century and because modern day science, but maybe what my Hakka ancestors called dragon gods and land spirits is actually an electromagnetic radiation that oscillates through the field, and it's a wave on the EM spectrum that we just haven't figured out or discovered. We know about radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, UV, x-rays, gamma, and maybe this is another wavelength of radiation we haven't quite figured out yet. But our ancestors, both yours and mine, definitely felt it and used the language of gods and spirits to describe what they very well knew was there. Different geographical places really do seem to be charged differently with an unseen force field in the atmosphere, and you really can't tell me you haven't felt this before. You don't intuitively know in your bones that this is true. I think that's why across so many different civilizations and all the different continents, fundamentally, so many of us believed in tutelary spirits, a god or goddess personification of a place or nation or culture that becomes the spirit protector of that place, nation, or culture. If you're Hakka and watching this, oh my gosh, please, please leave a Where's your family from? What do you know about your Hakka family history? Please share. And if you're not Hakka, so what? You know I love hearing from you. So if not dragon gods literally, what are your beliefs around the unseen forces emanating from the land you occupy? What are your thoughts on land spirits and ecosystems of land spirits? As usual, a long blog post accompanies this video Please, please do me the favor of checking it out. I put so much time and effort into writing it up. Just indulge me, okay? Teaching the oracle. Please help support my work and get yourself a copy.