Chu (, ) is a Daoist name used for various religious practices including communal chu (Kitchen) banquet rituals in Way of the Celestial Masters liturgy, the legendary xingchu (行廚, Mobile Kitchen) associated with Daoist xian ("transcendents; 'immortals'"), and wuchu (五廚, Five Kitchens) representing the wuzang (五臟, Five Viscera) in neidan meditation techniques.
Terminology Chú ("kitchen; to cook; a cook") can be written with three Chinese characters 廚, 㕑, and 厨. The common traditional Chinese character 廚 combines the "house radical" 广 with a phonetic indicator shù 尌 (joining zhù 壴 "drum" and cùn 寸 "hand"); and the variant traditional character 㕑 has "cliff radical" 厂 instead of 广. The simplified Chinese character 厨 omits the 士 element in 壴, leading to a "graphic folk etymology" of "A 厂 'room' for cooking 豆 'beans' with your 寸 'hands'". The Chinese logograph 廚 was anciently used as a loan character for chú 櫥 (with the "wood radical" 木, "cabinet") or chú 幮 ("cloth radical" 巾, "a screen used for a temporary kitchen").
The Modern Standard Chinese lexicon uses chu in many compound words, for instance, chúfáng (廚房 with 房 "room", "kitchen"), chúshī (廚師 with 師 "master", "cook; chef"), chúdāo (廚刀 with 刀 "knife", "kitchen knife"), and páochú (庖廚 with 庖 "kitchen", meaning "kitchen").
In Daoist specialized vocabulary, chu names a Kitchen-feast communal meal, and sometimes has a technical meaning of "magic", "used to designate the magical recipes through which one becomes invisible". The extensive semantic field of chu can be summarized in some key Daoist expressions: ritual banquets, communion with divinities, granaries (zang 藏, a word that also denotes the viscera), visualization of the Five Viscera (wuzang 五臟, written with the "flesh radical" ⺼), and abstention from cereals (bigu), and other food proscriptions. According to Daoist classics, when bigu "grain avoidance" techniques were successful, xingchu (行廚, Mobile Kitchens or tianchu (天廚, Celestial Kitchens) were brought in gold and jade vessels by the yunü (玉女, Jade Women) and jintong (金僮, Golden Boys), associated with the legendary Jade Emperor.
Chinese Buddhist terminology applies chu (廚, cf. 櫥 "cabinet") "kitchen; kitchen cupboard" to denote the "cabinet for an image or relic of the Buddhas", translating Sanskrit bhakta-śālā "food-hall" or mahânasa "kitchen".Digital Dictionary of Buddhism.
In Chinese astronomy, Tiānchú (天廚, Celestial Kitchen) is the name of an asterism in the constellation Draco, located next to Tiānbàng (天棓, Celestial Flail), and Nèichú (內廚, Inner Kitchen).
Translations There is no standard English translation for either Daoist chu (廚, Kitchen) or xingchu (行廚, Mobile Kitchen). The former is rendered as: "kitchen festival", "kitchen feast" "Kitchens" "kitchen banquets" "cuisines" "Kitchens" "cuisines" These Anglophone scholars render Chinese chu as either English kitchen ("a room for preparing food"), optionally clarified with K-, -festival or -feast, or cuisine ("a characteristic style of cooking, often associated with a place of origin"). The latter follows Francophone sinologists, for instance Henri Maspero and Christine Mollier, who accurately translated Chinese chu as French cuisine ("kitchen; cooking") and xingchu as cuisine de voyage ("travel kitchen"). Although English kitchen and French cuisine are doublets deriving from Latin cocīna ("cooking; kitchen"), they are false friends with significant semantic differences between English kitchen and cuisine. Chinese usually translates English kitchen as chúfáng (廚房, "kitchen") and cuisine as pēngrèn (烹飪, "art of cooking").
The term xingchu (行廚) has been translated as "Traveling Canteen" "mobile kitchen" "perform the Kitchen" "travelling kitchen-feast" "traveling canteen' "traveling kitchen" "movable cuisines" "Mobile Kitchens" Joseph Needham calls Ware's "Traveling Canteen" a "bizarre translation". While Maspero uniquely interprets the xing (行) in xingchu as a verb ("to perform"), the other scholars read it as a modifier ("to go; to move") translated as traveling, mobile, or movable (cf. movable feast). The chu noun in xingchu is translated as English kitchen, cuisine, or canteen. However, the latter ambiguous word has several meanings besides canteen ("a cafeteria or snack bar provided by an organization"), canteen ("a small water bottle"), and British English canteen ("a case or box containing a cutlery set"). To further complicate translating xingchu, travelling canteen was the 18th-century equivalent of a picnic basket. In modern terms, the xingchu is comparable with a mobile kitchen, military field kitchen, food truck, or food cart.
Chu Kitchen feast The chu (廚, Kitchen), also known as fushi (福食, "good luck meal"), was a religious banquet that usually involved preliminary fasting and purification before consuming a meal of vegetarian food and Chinese wine. The banquet was hosted by families on the occasion of births and deaths, prepared for a ritually-fixed number of parishioners, and accompanied by specific ritual gifts to the Daoist priest. Although the Kitchen Feast became a regular element of organized Daoist religious traditions, scholars do not know the date when it was introduced into the liturgy. One early textual record is the c. 499 Zhen'gao saying that Xu Mi (許谧, 303–376) offered a Kitchen meal to five persons .
These communal chu Kitchen banquets have a pre-Daoist antecedent in popular Chinese folk religion: the term chu was anciently used for the ceremonial meals organized by communities to honor the she (社, God of the Soil). Although orthodox Daoists criticized, and sometimes banned, these chuhui (廚會, "cuisine congregations") for making immoral animal sacrifices, they nevertheless perpetuated the custom by adapting and codifying it. Chu kitchen-feasts have many features in common with another Daoist ritual meal, the zhāi (齋, "fast; purification; retreat"), and the two are frequently treated as having the same functions. The 7th-century Daoist Zhaijielu (齋戒錄, Records of Fasting) suggested that zhai were anciently called shehui (社會, "festival gatherings of the soil god"—now the modern Chinese word for "society"), which was later changed into zhaihui (齋會).
The Way of the Celestial Masters religion, founded by Zhang Daoling in 142 CE, celebrated chu kitchen festivals at New Year and the annual sanhui (三會, Three Assemblies), which were major Daoist festivals held in the first, seventh, and tenth lunar months, when believers assembled at their local parish to report any births, deaths, or marriages, so that the population registers could be updated. Parishioners who had reason to celebrate on these occasions would host a chu feast for other members of the community in proportion to the significance of their auspicious event and their means. Accounts of these banquets "emphasize both the sharing of food and the affirmation of the unique, religious merit-based social order of the Daoist community".
The chu sacrament had three levels of banquets and ritual gifts, depending upon what the family was celebrating. For the birth of a boy, the shangchu (上廚, Superior Ceremony of the Kitchen) was a banquet offered to the priest and ten members of the parish, with gifts to the priest of a hundred sheets of paper, a pair of ink brushes, an inkstick, and an ink scraper. For the birth of a girl, it was the less expensive zhongchu (中廚, Middle Ceremony of the Kitchen) with a banquet for five parishioners, and the gifts, which the parents had to provide within one month following the birth, were a mat, a wastebasket, and a broom. For the death of a family member, the xiachu (下廚, Inferior Ceremony of the Kitchen), also called jiechu (解廚, Kitchen of Deliverance), is not described in Daoist texts, and we only know that the rival Buddhist polemicists claimed it was a "great orgy".
The anti-Daoist Erjiaolun (二教論, Essay on Two Religions) by the Buddhist monk Dao'an (312–385) said chu kitchen-feasts were intended to bring about jiěchú (解除, "liberation and elimination") from pollution and sins, which were connected with the soil god and tombs. The parallel passage in the 6th-century Bianhuolun (辯惑論, Essay on Debating Doubts) uses the homophonous graphic variant of jiěchú (解廚, "liberation kitchen"), thus connecting both chú "kitchen" and chú "liberation" to non-Daoist gods of the soil.
Daoist sources record that the people invited to a chu Kitchen feast would first observe a period of purification that included fasting and abstention from sex. Kitchen rituals lasted for one, three, or seven days. Participants consumed exclusively vegetarian food and moderate amounts of wine, which was considered as a mandatory element of the banquet. For the Superior Kitchens five sheng of wine (about a liter) per person was planned, for the Middle Kitchens, four sheng, and for the Inferior Kitchen three. The participants "must have departed a bit happy, but not drunk." The leftovers were given to other parishioners who could thereby share in the ritual.
Besides annual festivals on fixed dates like the Three Assemblies, chu Kitchen ceremonies were also performed in special circumstances, particularly when there was disease, sin, or death pollution. They were believed to have exorcistic and salvific powers and to confer good luck or merit upon the adepts. Kitchen ceremonies often involved Daoist ritual jiao (醮, "offerings") of cakes and pieces of fabric in order to obtain particular favors, such as petitions for recovery from illnesses, prayers for rain in time of drought, and thanksgivings for favors received. An altar was laid out in the open air, and the priest recited prayers.
Ge Hong's c. 318 Baopuzi (see below) mentions profligately expensive chu Kitchen Feasts in contrasting heterodox yaodao (妖道, "demonic cults"), which involved sacrificing animals to gods who enjoyed their blood, with the Lijia dao (李家道, Way of the Li Family). The context praises the contemporary charlatan healer Li Kuan (李寬) for not following the ancient tradition of animal sacrifice, while blaming him for extravagance. The more than a hundred ways for dealing with demons [諸妖道百餘種] all call for slaying living creatures so that their blood may be drunk. Only the doctrine of the Lis [李家道] is slightly different. Yet, though it does no butchering, whenever its "good-luck food" is served [每供福食], it includes varieties of mixtures without limit. In planning the meal, one strives for sumptuousness, and the rarest things must be purchased. Several dozen may work in the kitchen [或數十人廚], and costs for food can run high indeed. In turn, these are not completely disinterested affairs, and they might well be classed with things to be forbidden.
Xingchu Mobile Kitchen traditions In Daoist hagiographies and stories, the esoteric ability to summon a xingchu (行廚, Mobile Kitchen) was a standard trope for the powers of a xian transcendent. The xingchu, which Campany called a "curious business", was a sumptuous banquet of rare delicacies, exotic foods, and wines that could be instantly served up by spirits anywhere on command.
The tradition of xingchu "meditational cuisines" or "contemplative cuisines" seems to have developed in a parallel and complementary manner to the chu "communal cuisine liturgy". Xian transcendents were portrayed as eschewing what counted in China as ordinary foods, especially grains (see bigu), and instead eating superior, longevity-inducing substitutes such as sesame seeds and lingzhi mushrooms, typically found in distant and legendary places removed from the heartland of agriculture-based Chinese civilization. Transcendents were frequently depicted as winged beings able to fly long distances rapidly and summoning a xingchu banquet at will eliminated the need to travel across the world and heavens in order to obtain rare foodstuffs of immortality.