So what's the explanation about the open umbrella inside/outside the house? Is there any kind of spiritual logic to it?
Is it that if we should NOT open the umbrella outside, without closing it then bring it inside the house?
Y'all, check out what I bumped across from the internet. Taken from http://www.sinorama.com.tw so all rights and what nots belong to them.
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Men are good for you?!
Wang Yi-chia, who graduated in medicine from National Taiwan University, has an extremely unromantic theory about why female ghosts look for lonely men without partners. "The basic reason lies in the fact that men have nocturnal emissions," he avers.
Many scholars who have studied man's belief in a spirit world trace this belief to dreams. When early man saw deceased persons or total strangers in dreams, he could only explain them as phantoms. Men who have nocturnal emissions, meanwhile, often dream of beautiful women. How to explain the appearance of these beautiful, stimulating women? Perhaps they, too, are ghosts! Wang explains the fact that ghost stories invariably involve ghost females encountering young male scholars to this biological difference between men and women. He strengthens his argument by drawing attention to the Chinese faith in "using yang [which represents both the masculine and mundane] to compensate for weaknesses in yin [which represents both the feminine and the otherworldly]."
In the Lie Yi Zhuan (Tales of the Strange) of the Wei-Jin era, there is the following story: There was a scholar named Tan, 40 years old and unmarried. One night he was reading the Shi Jing (Book of Odes), when a young girl of 15 or 16 appeared. She gave herself to him, and they became man and wife. But she warned Tan that until three years had passed, he could never shine a light on her.
After they had a son, one night, Tan was unable to restrain himself. Taking advantage of his wife's slumber, he took a lantern and had a peek. He was startled to see that the wife with whom he shared his bed every night was flesh and blood only above the waist-below she was a skeleton.
Then there is the story "Skeleton of the Temple of Zhou Yu" from the Qing dynasty. Within half a month after the female ghost began her relationship with the scholar, new flesh began to grow in around her eyes. It seems like the "yang within the yang" (the sperm within the male) could actually put flesh on the bones of the "yin within the yin" (a woman in the spirit world). This may also be why the young scholars get weaker and weaker.
The ancient Chinese medical text Qian Jin Fang (Essential Prescriptions Worth One Thousand Gold Ingots) has one intriguing segment which reads, "Thinking of intercourse when alone is very harmful to longevity and brings on many illnesses. Demons may take advantage of this to have intercourse. . . which will cause immense loss to man's essence." This clearly states that men are a "tonic" for female ghosts. On the other hand, living women are seen as "yin within the yang" (the feminine in the mundane world), and cannot be of any value to the "yang within the yin" (male ghosts in the spirit world), which is another reason why one never hears of traditional ghost tales involving the shades of men having relations with living women.