Jinghe Year Fifteen, May twelfth: an auspicious day, favorable for marriage, gathering with friends and kin, moving into a home, and installing incense altars.
The ancient rites declared: marriage ceremonies were performed at dusk, hence marriage was called "dusk."
It embodied the meaning of yang departing and yin arriving, of a man welcoming a woman home.
Thus, the rite of personally fetching the bride had to take place at dusk!
The groom went at his father's command, bearing a wild goose as his offering, and laid it in the bride's ancestral temple to inform her ancestors; only then did the bride depart.
These were the rites established by the Duke of Zhou and expounded by Confucius, an immutable canon through a thousand years.
At the beginning of You Hour, the evening drums had yet to sound, and the street lamps had yet to be lit.
The Wei Residence's Ancestral Temple occupied the eastern wing of the Main Hall.
Three rooms had been opened into one, neither spacious nor splendid, with only plain curtains, spotless tables, a blue-flamed lamp, and an ancient incense burner.
At the center of the offering table stood just three spirit tablets.
In this entire Ancestral Temple, at the moment of his marriage, there was not a single person who could offer Wei Nisheng the ceremonial cup of wine.
With no parents to offer their son the wine, he offered it to himself.
Three sticks of incense, three wisps of blue smoke: one offered to heaven, one to earth, and one to the mortal world.
Just like these three departed people before him!
They had given him, in this new life...
His destiny, his path, his life.
Then Wei Nisheng stepped back three paces, gathered his robes, and knelt.
Three Kneelings and Nine Prostrations.
When the prostrations