Abstract:
The elegy was a significant event at ancient funeral ceremony and a specific form of mourning literature. In recent years nearly all epitaphs with elegies were discovered in Zelu in times of the Five Dynasties. These epitaphic elegies represented the current people’s simple view of life and death fused with Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist conceptions to obtain happiness and eternality in the future world. Meanwhile, these cases were also closely associated with changes in funeral system and funeral ceremony and customs in the Tang Dynasty in terms of transformations in the Tang and the Song Dynasty.
