Chu (Taoism)

Lore & Background

The chu Kitchen feast, also known as fushi ('blessed meal' or 'good fortune meal'), was a religious banquet involving preliminary fasting and purification before consuming vegetarian food and wine. Hosted by families on occasions of births and deaths, it was prepared for a ritually-fixed number of parishioners and accompanied by specific ritual gifts to the Daoist priest. The earliest explicit textual reference to chu as a ritual meal is often attributed to the c. 499 Zhen'gao, though the dating of the Xiang'er commentary is debated. These banquets have a pre-Daoist antecedent in popular Chinese folk religion, where chu was used for ceremonial meals honoring the God of the Soil. Orthodox Daoists criticized folk practices for making immoral animal sacrifices, but the Celestial Masters themselves prohibited animal sacrifice in their own chu rituals, adapting and codifying the custom.

Reader's Guide

The chu Kitchen feast became a regular element of organized Daoist religious traditions, though scholars do not know the date when it was introduced into the liturgy. The Way of the Celestial Masters celebrated chu festivals at New Year and the annual Three Assemblies, when parishioners would host feasts in proportion to their auspicious events and means. The chu sacrament had three levels: Superior Kitchen for a boy's birth, Middle Kitchen for a girl's birth, and Inferior Kitchen for a death. Participants observed purification including fasting and abstention from sex, with rituals lasting one, three, or seven days. The term also appears in Chinese astronomy as Tiānchú (Celestial Kitchen), an asterism in Draco. The semantic field of chu extends to granaries, visualization of the Five Viscera, and grain avoidance techniques, where Mobile Kitchens were brought by Jade Women and Golden Boys.

Did You Know?

• The chu Kitchen feast was also known as fushi, meaning 'blessed meal' or 'good fortune meal'.
• The earliest explicit textual reference to a Kitchen meal is often attributed to the c. 499 Zhen'gao, not definitively the Xiang'er commentary.
• The Way of the Celestial Masters celebrated chu festivals at New Year and the annual Three Assemblies on the seventh day of the first month, the seventh day of the seventh month, and the fifth day of the tenth month.
• In Chinese astronomy, Tiānchú (Celestial Kitchen) is an asterism in the constellation Draco.