Secular And Sacred Dialogue

The Kitchen God is a deity of Chinese folk belief with its universality and representativeness. The belief and the legend of the Kitchen God are the outcomes of the common customs livings. She wholly reflects the exuberance and heterogeneousness of the Chinese folk culture. To be a folk common deity, The Kitchen God is also regarded as the visualizing embodiment of the folk ideological expression in Chinese patriarchal clan system, aslo one media of seeking the civil character and culture psychology of the Chinese people.First of all, this article dissertates the derivation of Kitchen God by focusing on the historical development of the Kitchen God Belief. From ancient to modern society, the archetype of the Kitchen God has numerous and complicated parlances. There are three kinds of resources: the ancient recordation, the neoteric scholastic textual research and the folklore. Some said that the Kitchen God evolved from the Fire God, The Yan Emperor or Zhu Rong, or from the Yellow Emperor; some said that it was called Zhang Dan, Su Jili, or it was a goddess. Besides these, some scholars said the archetype was a 'frog totem' or a Kitchen 'cockroach'. These textual researches focus on totem belief, ancient writing and phonology and other aspects. And there are still folklores, which tell stories about commons evolving to be the Kitchen God.From ancient society to modern society, the Kitchen God develops to implicate many common customs and living conceptions. At the very beginning, the Kitchen God was only in charge of bite and sup, later it became to be the God of 'fate' and a 'Home Dominator', who was in charge of the family members' short or long lives, disaster or fortune. It has close relation with the Taoism, and as a matter of fact, the Kitchen God is an important deity in the Taoism, from which we could understand some ideas of the Taoism. The sacrifice rite of the Kitchen God evolved along with the development of history. Many of them have their relevant evolving process, like 'the yellow goat sacrifice', 'sending the Kitchen God to Heaven', 'the Kitchen candy sacrifice' and 'meeting with the Kitchen God' etc, also including other relevant customs like 'sending off the poverty', ' beggar jumping for Kitchen God' and 'the marring of the mouse' daughters'. After a long period of time, every 23rd, or 24th of the first month of the lunar year, called 'Xiao Nian' was determined tobe the date for the sacrifice of the Kitchen God (the date when the Kitchen God return Heaven).The beliefs of the Kitchen God and its legends have the relative general mode of its major modality. That is the consequence of the culture communication and amalgamation. Besides, whatever the Han nationality or the minority maintains plenty of folklores that related to the Kitchen God.The Kitchen God has multifarious images; whereas the sacrifice rites keep the catholicity combining with the different nationality geographically that fully reflects the pluralism of the Chinese national cultures.The belief of the Kitchen God is the outcome of the evolvement of the common customs conceptions. In fact, the deities were generated from human hearts, becoming the projection of various common customs. The folk belief could be regarded as a culture phenomenon created and transmitted by human beings in order to meet their psychological needs for living and evolution. By detecting the cultural connotation of the belief of the Kitchen God, we could understand the different conception of the deity belief of the Chinese people.The research of folklores should be engaged in not only their narratives but also the symbolic meaning. The kitchen symbolizes home, so it can be regarded as the folk ideological expression of the Chinese traditional patriarchal clan system to call Kitchen God as Home Dominator. The folk consciousness showed submission under restraint from official culture and country consciousness, however; on the other hand, it also showed dispersal and opposition to country power, which would be clearly revealed in the beli...