The pantheon · Folk Deities (民間信仰)
Zao Shen
灶神 · Zao Shen (Wade-Giles: Tsao-shen)
Folk religion
The Kitchen God, who watches the family and reports once a year to Heaven.
The god of the stove and the household, enshrined above the kitchen hearth. Also called Zao Jun, he keeps account of a family's conduct through the year and carries his tally up to Heaven at its close.
- Portfolio
- The household hearth · Family conduct and morality · The annual report to Heaven
- Observance
- The Kitchen God's key day is the Little New Year (Xiaonian), the twenty-third of the twelfth lunar month in the north and the twenty-fourth in the south — the split itself is a good marker of how local these customs are. The rite is simple and done at home rather than at a temple: offer sticky sweets or malt-sugar candy (the widely sold guandong tang is made for exactly this), burn the old image, and paste up a new one on New Year's Eve. The Baopuzi, a fourth-century Daoist text, already describes the Stove God ascending to report household transgressions, so the custom is very old; its particulars, though, have never been uniform.
How to recognise them
Usually not a statue but a cheap paper print pasted on the wall above the stove, renewed each year. The print shows a dignified official, often with his wife beside him, sometimes framed by a calendar and the couplet promising to speak well in Heaven and return with blessings. The image is deliberately humble and disposable, because at year's end it is burned.
The most widely told story of how a man became the Stove God is a cautionary one. A husband named Zhang Lang abandoned his faithful wife for another woman, fell into poverty and blindness, and ended up begging. By chance he came to beg at the house of his former wife, who recognised him and fed him. Realising who his benefactor was, and overcome with shame, he threw himself into the kitchen hearth and died. Heaven, moved by his remorse, made him god of the stove.
From his place above the hearth, the Kitchen God sees everything the family does — the meals, the quarrels, the small dishonesties of ordinary life. On the twenty-third or twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month, a week before the New Year, he leaves to make his report to the Jade Emperor, and his conduct grade is said to shape the household's fortune in the year to come. This is why the send-off matters so much: it is the family's one chance to influence the account before it is filed.
The send-off is domestic theatre. The old paper image is taken down and burned so its smoke can rise, sometimes with a paper horse for the journey; the sticky sweet is offered first. In some regions a splash of wine is added, in the hope, half-joked, that a tipsy god is a lenient one. Seven days later, on New Year's Eve, a fresh print is pasted up to welcome him home for another year. As with all these customs, the details vary from province to province and household to household.
Nearby
Written from
- Baopuzi neipian (The Inner Chapters of the Master Who Embraces Simplicity) — Ge Hong
- Chinese Gods: The Unseen World of Spirits and Demons — Keith Stevens, 1997
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