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Early Daoist Dietary Practices
Examining Ways to Health and Longevity
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2013
Summary
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.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2013
ISBN-Print
978-0-7391-7892-8
ISBN-Online
978-0-7391-7893-5
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
278
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
List of Figures No access
Acknowledgements No access
1 Introduction No access Pages 1 - 18
2 The Wufuxu’s Recipe Structure and Content No access Pages 19 - 40
3 Dietary Regimens: From Herbs to Qi No access Pages 41 - 1
4 Healing and Improving the Physical Body No access Pages 61 - 92
5 Beyond Physical Health: The Wufuxu’s Extraordinary Claims No access Pages 93 - 134
