A ritual to communicate with the hidden beings or forces in the mountain villages in the west Hunan usually take place before a wedding or a death, during Chinese New Year or other important festivals. For a funeral ritual, the family members and their friends and relatives would guard the body of the deceased during day and night for days before it was buried. It was, in fact, a common practice in all over China for thousands of years, which serves two purposes primarily: to prevent the people to be buried alive and to allow the focus of the consciousness of the deceased enough time to shift away from the body that has ceased to function.