路对着家门口，墙上刻“石敢当”

In old villages and old streets in the south, you can often see a stone standing at a corner of a wall, with a few characters carved on it: “Shi Gandang,” and some have the two characters “Taishan” before it.

The folk belief is: when a road runs straight toward a family’s front door, this is called “road rush,” or a “T-junction,” and the house facing it is said to be struck by evil spirits, ghosts, and bad things from the road, making the home restless.

At such times, a stone is erected on the wall facing the road, with “Shi Gandang” carved on it, which can send the rushing evil spirits back.

There are many theories about the origin of Shi Gandang. Some say it was an ancient man of great strength named Shi Gandang who guarded a region; others say that in a Han-dynasty literacy primer, these three characters appeared, and at that time it was a personal name. A stone stele from the fifth year of the Dali era of the Tang Dynasty was unearthed in Putian, Fujian, carved with: “Shi Gandang, subdues a hundred ghosts, wards off disaster and calamity,” one of the earliest physical examples still visible today.

Nowadays they are no longer seen in many cities, but Fujian, Taiwan, and Okinawa still preserve quite a few.

In Okinawa, Shi Gandang stones are often placed at the end of T-junctions. Okinawans believe that ghosts and monsters only walk straight and cannot turn; when they hit a stone, they are bounced back.

So even now, in the back alleys of Okinawa, as you walk along, you may see around a corner a small stone with characters carved on it, leaning against a wall, covered in moss.

#Folklore #网络转载