Shennong, the Divine Farmer

Open the oldest surviving BencaoA materia medica: a Chinese pharmacological classic cataloguing drugs from plants, minerals and animals by nature and use, the genre named for its root-and-herb core. of China, its foundational materia medica, at the preface and you find not a list of herbs but a court. Three hundred and sixty-five drugs are ranked in three grades, and the grades are offices of state. One hundred and twenty upper drugs are the sovereigns, non-toxic, nurturing life, answering to Heaven; a hundred and twenty middle drugs are the ministers, some toxic and some not, answering to Man; a hundred and twenty-five lower drugs are the aides and envoys, mostly poisonous, answering to Earth, the ones that actually break a fever or dissolve a swelling. A prescription is assembled like a cabinet: one sovereign, two ministers, five aides, or else one sovereign, three ministers, nine aides and envoys. The book that lays out this pharmacy-as-government is the Shennong Bencao Jing, the Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica, and every herbalist in the Chinese world for two thousand years has worked in the shadow of the god whose name it carries.

The name a physician swears by

That name is the whole difficulty of the man. The plough he hewed and the hundred plants he chewed to learn their flavours belong to another telling; here he is the patron of a discipline, the founding namesake of Chinese drug-lore. A rule preserved in the Liji held that one should not take medicine from a physician who was not of three generations’ learning, and the old commentators read those three generations as three books: the Yellow Emperor’s Acu-moxa, Shennong’s Materia Medica, and the Plain-Maid’s Pulse-Formulas.

To be a doctor at all was to stand on those three names, and Shennong held the herbs. The tasting-legend had hardened into a scaffold. Where the myth said he sampled the flavours of the plants, the Bencao gives the flavours a system: five of them, sour, salty, sweet, bitter and pungent, crossed with four energies, cold, hot, warm and cool, and toxicity noted or denied for each drug. The wild private catalogue of one god’s mouth had become a taxonomy anyone could learn.

There is a sober, tactile carefulness at the far end of the wild story too. For a toxic drug, the preface instructs, begin with a dose the size of a millet-grain; when the illness goes, stop; if it does not go, double it, and if still not, increase it tenfold, taking the going of the illness as the measure. This is what the legend of a god who met seventy poisons hardened into: a method, the smallest possible first step into danger, measured out grain by grain.

Under a name he never signed

And yet the tradition itself, at its most learned, denies that Shennong wrote a syllable of it. The objection is old and blunt: in Shennong’s age, writing had not yet been made. A god of the preliterate dawn cannot have compiled a book.

The Qing scholar Sun Xingyan, whose 1799 recension gathers the surviving text, records the difficulty and then records the tradition’s answer, quoting Tao HongjingThe sixth-century Liang-dynasty physician and Daoist who edited the received materia medica, setting the older canon in red ink and later additions in black.: before the Yellow Emperor, writing was not yet transmitted, so the properties of drugs were passed down by recognition upon recognition, mouth to mouth and hand to hand, until Tongjun and Leigong at last set them in bamboo strips. The knowledge was Shennong’s; the writing came far later. The book is his by attribution, exactly as the great medical canon is the Yellow Emperor’s by attribution and not by his pen.

The catalogues bear the seam out. The Han bibliographies list no materia medica under Shennong’s name at all; what they record is a drug-book credited to one Ziyi. The title Shennong’s Materia Medica first appears in the Sui dynasty catalogue, though the three-tier core is judged an old text from the Han onward. So the name is a Han-and-later projection onto a much older mythic figure, laid on a text catalogued six centuries after the Han and reconstructed seventeen centuries after it. A claim like Shennong’s Materia Medica is a mythic name resting on a many-handed book.

Red ink and black

The philology that separates the layers is worth watching at work. In the copy Tao Hongjing made, the base canon stood in vermilion characters and the later editors’ additions in black, red and black written together, so a reader could literally see which stratum was the god’s. And when scholars wanted to strip out the interpolations, they had a tell.

The ancient drug-entries name the places where each herb grows, and the places are Later-Han commanderies and counties, administrative units that did not exist in any Shennong’s day. The original text, Sun Xingyan argued from early quotations, said only that a drug grows in the valleys or grows in the marshes; the named prefectures were the accretion of later hands. The oldest layer speaks in the vague language of a landscape; the map was drawn in later.

There is a caution folded into that red ink. Many of the upper drugs promise to lighten the body, hold off age, and turn a man into an immortal, and the mineral drugs like cinnabar are said to transform into quicksilver. This is the alchemical, deathless-seeking worldview of the text’s own age, not an ancestor of modern chemistry. The Bencao is a document of what its compilers believed a drug could do, which is not the same as what a drug does.

A different Shennong, and no plough at all

Set beside the toiling inventor of medicine there is a Shennong who invents nothing, and he is older in the record than any of this. In the Zhuangzi, the age of Shennong is the last good age before civilisation’s fall, a Daoist idyll of contentment. The people of that reign lay down easy and content and rose up mild and free; they knew their mothers but not their fathers, dwelt among the elk and the deer, ploughed for their food and wove for their clothes, and had no wish to harm one another.

This, the text says, was the height of Perfect Virtue, and it was the Yellow Emperor who ended it, going to war at Zhuolu until blood ran a hundred li. In another chapter the Shennong age joins a roll-call of primeval clans whose people knotted cords for their records, savoured their plain food and thought their coarse clothes fine, and grew old and died in villages within earshot of each other’s cocks and dogs without ever once coming and going between them.

This is the exact opposite of the strenuous culture-hero. The Baihu TongThe digest of the imperially convened White Tiger Hall debates of 79 CE, ascribed to Ban Gu, fixing Later-Han Confucian doctrine on titles, rites and cosmology., the digest of the Later-Han academy debates, explains his very name by crisis: anciently the people ate the flesh of birds and beasts, but as they multiplied the game ran short, so Shennong read the seasons of Heaven and the advantages of the Earth, made the plough, and taught farming, and by divinely transforming the people so they thrived he earned the title Divine Farmer.

There the name is an answer to scarcity and pressure. In the Zhuangzi the same name floats over a world with no scarcity to answer, where nobody strives and nothing is invented because nothing is lacking. Roughly three centuries separate the Zhuangzi’s Warring-States utopia from the Baihu Tong’s precisely dated debates of 79 CE, and the two put the identical name to opposite uses: the quietist ideal of a world before effort, and the Confucian founder-hero of effort itself.

So thoroughly did the name fuse with the work that it stopped being only a name. In the ritual calendar of the Liji, shennong is simply husbandry: the ruler is warned to issue no order that would hinder the work of shennong, and told that when the floodwaters swell in abundance the work of shennong is about to begin. The god had become a season, and a chore, and the plain word for the thing he was said to have given.

One hundred and twenty upper drugs are the sovereigns; they govern the nurture of life and answer to Heaven. One hundred and twenty middle drugs are the ministers; they govern the nurture of the nature and answer to Man. One hundred and twenty-five lower drugs are the aides and envoys; they govern the treating of disease and answer to Earth. (Shennong Bencao Jing, preface; author’s rendering from the Chinese)