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Ge Hong, the pioneer of epidemic prevention, classified lingzhi as an immortal’s elixir.

Release date:

2023-06-19

Ge Hong (283–363), courtesy name Zhichuan, styled himself Bao Puzi, was a native of Jurong County in Danyang Commandery (present-day Jurong County, Jiangsu Province). He was a prominent Daoist theologian, renowned alchemist, and medical scholar of the Eastern Jin dynasty, commonly known as “the Little Immortal.”
Ge Hong, in his work “Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies,” recorded the world’s earliest treatments for smallpox and other diseases, making him one of the earliest heroes in the fight against epidemics.
Nobel laureate Tu Youyou, inspired by the passage in Ge Hong’s “Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies”—“Take a handful of artemisia, soak it in two sheng of water, squeeze out the juice, and drink it all”—extracted artemisinin from artemisia to develop an effective antimalarial drug.
In the late Eastern Han period, with the rise of Daoism, the preparation and ingestion of elixirs became a fashionable practice. As a superior-grade “immortal medicine,” lingzhi began to appear extensively in various Daoist classics.
In the “Inner Chapters” of his work “Baopuzi,” titled “Immortal Medicines,” the Eastern Jin scholar Ge Hong wrote:
The Four Classics of Shennong state: Superior medicines bring peace to the body and prolong life, elevating one to the status of a celestial deity, who roams freely between heaven and earth, commands all spirits, grows feathers and wings, and can summon food with a mere thought. It is further said that the Five Types of Mushrooms, along with elixirs made from cinnabar, jade tablets, verdigris, realgar, orpiment, mica, and Taiyi’s surplus grain—each may be taken alone—and all enable one to fly and attain everlasting life.
The Five Types of Zhī are: stone zhī, wood zhī, grass zhī, flesh zhī, and mushroom zhī, each comprising roughly a hundred varieties.
He devoted extensive space to describing the forms and effects of various types of lingzhi mushrooms, which, in essence, can be summarized as follows: “When the lingzhi is ground into a powder or dissolved in water and consumed, it imparts lightness of body and confers longevity, rendering one ageless.”
Accompanying item: Bao Puzi