Early Daoist Dietary Practices

Examining Ways to Health and Longevity

By (author) Shawn Arthur

Not available to order

Publication date:

27 June 2013

Length of book:

416 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739178935

Much as the modern Western world is concerned with diets, health, and anti-aging remedies, many early medieval Chinese Daoists also actively sought to improve their health and increase their longevity through specialized ascetic dietary practices. Focusing on a fifth-century manual of herbal-based, immortality-oriented recipes—the Lingbao Wufuxu (The Preface to the Five Lingbao Talismans of Numinous Treasure)—Shawn Arthur investigates the diets, their ingredients, and their expected range of natural and supernatural benefits. Analyzing the ways that early Daoists systematically synthesized religion, Chinese medicine, and cosmological correlative logic, this study offers new understandings of important Daoist ideas regarding the body’s composition and mutability, health and disease, grain avoidance (bigu) diets, the parasitic Three Worms, interacting with the spirit realm, and immortality. This work also employs a range of cross-disciplinary scientific and medical research to analyze the healing properties of Daoist self-cultivation diets and to consider some natural explanations for better understanding Daoist asceticism and its underlying world view.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Wufuxu’s Recipe Structure and Content
Chapter 3: Dietary Regimens: From Herbs to Qi
Chapter 4: Healing and Improving the Physical Body
Chapter 5: Beyond Physical Health: The Wufuxu’s Extraordinary Claims
Chapter 6: Daoist Grain Avoidance Today
Chapter 7: The Wufuxu’s Ingredients and Fasting
Chapter 8: Analyzing Dietary Ideals and Practices
Chapter 9: Conclusion

Shawn Arthur’s new book makes a major contribution to the study of both the medicinal and religious cultures of an early collection of recipes . . . Perhaps the most important features of Arthur’s book are the resources he provides to decipher the esoteric vocabulary and hyperbolic claims commonplace in these kinds of texts. . . .This book a useful resource for historians of religion to consult when studying the Wufuxu’s recipes or similar texts of medieval China. . . .Arthur’s contributions . . . make this a very attractive book that historians of China will find helpful to historians of medicine. The appendices, in particular, will help future scholars establish what kinds of pharmacological substances were known among medieval adepts.