Record Pertaining to Donating Fields for Additional Sacrifices (Text)

Record Pertaining to Donating Fields for Additional Sacrifices

This document was appended to the genealogy when it was updated in 1824. It addresses the rules for donation of fields whose income could be used to support ancestral sacrifices that would include their immediate ancestors, but it also notes the various kinds of cheating.

Record Pertaining to Donating Fields for Additional Sacrifices

This is what I heave learned: there are five constants in the rites, of them none is more important than the sacrifices. The Hall of Filial Devotion of our lineage has set two sacrifices in spring and autumn to make offerings to the first ancestor. Beyond the first ancestor, those of merit and virtue may also be put in the ancestral temple and receive sacrifices. However, the income from the temple’s rents is very small. Thus, after the annual regular and miscellaneous expenses, we are not able to make plentiful sacrificial offerings. In the past, the first ancestor Mr. Yi 75^th, being deep in feeling and respecting the ancestors, donated fields to support the sacrifices. The whole lineage was impressed by his filial piety and placed [the spirit tablets of] Mr. Yi 75^th himself, his grandfather, and his father to be worshipped. Each year in the spring and autumn his descendants received raw and cooked sacrificial meat. Afterwards those who donated fields [so that their rents could be used] to help with the sacrifices were placed in the temple on the basis of this precedent. Mr. [Yi 75^th] assisted [the temple by donating] the fields to pay respect to the ancestors; later generations admired his virtue; they thus increased the sacrifice to him and included his predecessors [i.e. his grandfather and father] in the sacrifices. Compared to those who only care about their own close kin, wife, and children, who do not think of the ancestral sacrifices, is there not an enormous difference?

Our lineage admires his model and has continually added fields to support [additional sacrifices]. Since Mr. Ming 10^th and Mr. Hui 133^rd, each generation has had some people who made donations. In the temple the first ones to do this were Mr. Hui 188^th, Kuan 121^st, Kuan 137^th, Kuan 168^th, and others.  In 1740 we made the rule that all those who gave fields to support additional sacrifices were to be given sacrificial meat according to this precedent. Those who gave supporting fields that were infertile or smaller than one mu [1/6^th of an acre] could not be placed in the temple. This is clearly recorded in the compact; it is indeed just and proper. One fears that with the passage of time evidence of the contracts for the donation of supporting fields will be lost, and that someone might take advantage of this to provoke trouble, or might after the fact raise the price of the supporting field and put the extra money in his own pocket, or even that greedy people might take advantage of the loss of the evidence to occupy the supporting fields as their own without calling attention to the fact. These various frauds are obvious and identifiable. Today, on the occasion of the recompilation of the genealogy, [we] respectfully record clearly each donation of a supporting field in chronological order and append this to the genealogy, in the hope that the later generations will not forget the meaning of deepening the root and respecting the origin. May they never alter it.

In the gudan day in the autumn of the jiashen year (1824) of the Daoguang reign

Respectfully written by Yingkuei

 (from Zhiyan cun Chen shi zongpu 1996 ed. p. 130)