Shen Nong

Shen Nong a legendary ancient Chinese ruler, the second of the Three Sovereigns, honoured by tradition as the divine farmer who taught the Chinese people agriculture and discovered the medicinal properties of plants. He is revered as the patron of farming and of herbal medicine, and his name is attached to the earliest classic of Chinese pharmacology.

The Divine Farmer

Shen Nong, whose name means the divine farmer or the divine husbandman, belongs with Fu Xi and Huang Di to the legendary sage rulers of China's pre-dynastic age. Tradition presents him as a ruler who turned from the arts of hunting and symbol to the cultivation of the soil, teaching a wandering people to settle and to grow their food. His reign is placed in the third millennium before the common era, though no contemporary record survives.

He is described in the classical accounts as having the body of a man and the head of an ox or, in other versions, as bearing the horns of a bull, the animal of the plough. The imagery marks his close association with agriculture and with the patient labour of the field. He is said to have ordered the seasons, taught the people to sow and harvest in due time, and given them the year's round of work.

Like the other sovereigns of the triad, Shen Nong is remembered less as a conqueror than as a civiliser, a ruler whose contribution was the practical knowledge by which a settled society lives. Where Fu Xi gave signs and Huang Di gave government, Shen Nong gave the arts of subsistence, and his cult was above all a cult of the fruitful earth.

Agriculture and the Plough

The central achievement attributed to Shen Nong is the invention of agriculture. He is said to have taught people to clear the land, to distinguish the useful plants from the harmful, and to cultivate the five grains, the staple crops of the Chinese world. Under his guidance the shift from gathering to farming is said to have taken place, a change that made possible towns, crafts and the state itself.

He is credited with the invention of the plough and of the wooden agricultural implements with which the earth is broken and turned. He is said to have shown people how to use fire to clear fields and to enrich the soil, and how to store grain against the lean season. These gifts transformed the relationship between human beings and the land and formed the material foundation of Chinese civilisation.

Because farming depends on the calendar, Shen Nong is also associated with the ordering of time. He is said to have established the agricultural seasons and to have taught the people to read the signs of the heavens and of the growing plants. Markets and the exchange of produce are likewise traced to him, as farmers brought their surplus to a common place to trade.

The Discovery of Medicine

Shen Nong is best known in later tradition as the founder of Chinese herbal medicine. The most famous legend relates that he tasted hundreds of plants in order to learn their properties and their effects upon the human body, distinguishing those that nourish from those that heal and those that poison. He is said to have suffered many illnesses in the course of this search and to have been saved by the discovery of tea, which cleansed his body of the poisons he had swallowed.

This legend of the tasting of the hundred herbs provides the founding image of the Chinese physician as an empirical investigator who learns directly from nature. It also assigns to Shen Nong the origin of the pharmacopoeia, the systematic knowledge of drugs, and the therapeutic doctrine that health consists in the balance of the forces within the body.

The earliest surviving Chinese work on drugs, the Shen Nong Bencao Jing or classic of the materia medica of Shen Nong, is attributed to him, though it was compiled by many hands over centuries. It classifies medicinal substances into three grades according to their properties, describing the plants, minerals and animal products used in treatment, and it remained a foundation of Chinese pharmacy for nearly two thousand years.

Tea and Other Traditions

Shen Nong is widely honoured as the discoverer of tea. According to one tradition, leaves from a tree fell into the water he was boiling and produced a refreshing and healing infusion. The drink that resulted became one of the most characteristic features of Chinese life and a great article of trade. His association with tea made him a patron of agriculture, medicine and hospitality at once.

Other traditions credit him with the invention of the wooden plough, the digging stick and various tools of the farm and kitchen. He is said to have established the practice of barter, so that people could exchange the goods they produced, and to have taught the making of pottery and the use of firewood. As with Fu Xi, a great range of useful arts gathers under his name.

He is also associated with the philosophy of the balance of nature and with the belief that food and medicine are continuous with one another. This idea, that the proper use of plants sustains health and that diet is a form of healing, became a persistent theme of Chinese medicine and remains influential in East Asia and beyond.

Worship, Influence and Legacy

Shen Nong was worshipped as the patron of agriculture and of medicine. In later dynasties emperors performed rites in his honour and offered sacrifice to him as the divine farmer, sometimes at the head of an annual ceremony to inaugurate the ploughing season. Physicians and druggists honoured him as their founding sage, and his image appears in medical texts and in the shrines of apothecaries.

His legend gave Chinese culture a powerful ideal of the ruler as the servant of the people's material welfare, one who labours to secure their food and their health. It also established the empirical, observational strand in Chinese science, the belief that knowledge is won by direct encounter with nature rather than by speculation alone.

Shen Nong remains a vivid figure in the cultural memory of China. The phrase the hundred herbs and the story of their tasting evoke both the hardships of early civilisation and the reverence for those who teach the arts of life. His name still adorns the classic of materia medica attributed to him, a text that carried his authority into the practice of medicine for generations.

References

^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4]

↑ Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
↑ Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
↑ Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics, University of California Press, 1986.
↑ Derke Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science, University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

[r1-1] Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

[r2-2] Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[r3-3] Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics, University of California Press, 1986.

[r4-4] Derke Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science, University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

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