Bigu (grain avoidance)
For instance, bigu fasting was the common medical cure for expelling the sanshi 三尸 "Three Corpses", the malevolent, grain-eating spirits that live in the human body (along with the hun and po souls), report their host's sins to heaven every 60 days, and carry out punishments of sickness and early death.
The Chinese word bigu compounds bi 辟 "ruler; monarch; avoid; ward off; keep away" and gu 穀 or 谷 "cereal; grain; (穀子) millet".
(Hanfeizi 49)[14] In contrast, the Zhuangzi "Mending Nature" chapter mentions Suiren first in a list of mythic sage-rulers – Fu Xi, Shennong, Yellow Emperor, Tang of Shang, and Yu the Great, traditionally credited with advancing civilization – but depicts them as villains who began the destruction of the primal harmony of the Dao.
The Wangzhi "Royal Regulations" chapter of the Liji uses cooking food and eating grains to culturally classify the Chinese "Middle Kingdom" bordered by the "Four Barbarians" (eastern Yi, southern Man, western Rong, and northern Di).
As a result, the rural communities became an easy prey to all the ills of sedentary civilization: ever-higher taxes, enslavement to the government through corvée labor and military draft, epidemics, periodic shortages and famines, and wars and raids by non-Chinese tribes from across the borders.
A natural locus of nutritive "essence" (jing), grain nevertheless required cooperative, communal and differentiated stages of production—planting, tending, harvesting, storing, thrashing, milling, mixing, and cooking—to be transformed into food.
The (168 BCE) Quegu shiqi(Chinese: 卻穀食氣; pinyin: Què gǔ shí qì) "Eliminating Grain and Eating Qi" manuscript, which was discovered in 1973 among the Mawangdui Silk Texts, is the oldest documented grain-avoidance diet.
Zhang Liang "set about practising dietary restrictions and breathing and stretching exercises to achieve levitation" (namely, bigu, daoyin, and qingshen (Chinese: 輕身; pinyin: Qīng shēn) "lightening the body").
After Gaozu died, Empress Lü Zhi urged Zhang to eat, saying, "Man's life in this world is as brief as the passing of a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall.
Based upon this account (which is also found in the Lunheng), Campany concludes that by the late 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, "the idea that some practitioners were abstaining from grains while practicing methods for consuming, directing, and cultivating qi as alternate nourishment was ubiquitous and commonplace.
Liu Xiang's hagiography of Daoist xian, the Liexian Zhuan "Collected Biographies of Immortals", tells the famous "Hairy Woman" legend in terms of grain avoidance.
Ge Hong's (3rd century) Shenxian zhuan gives a different version – including the Hairy Woman's name of Yu Qiang and not mentioning her being captured or fed grains.
(6)[42] Chapter 15, "Miscellanea" (Chinese: 雜應; pinyin: Zá yīng), describes "avoiding grains" in terms that Campany says are "tantamount to not eating food at all" and "merely swallowing saliva and qi and ingesting medicinal preparations to suppress appetite and strengthen the body.
"[43] The chapter begins with the interlocutor asking about duangu "cutting off grains" and changsheng (Chinese: 長生; pinyin: Chángshēng)"longevity" (meaning "eternal life" in Daoist terminology).
Practitioners medicinally used huangqing (Chinese: 黃精; pinyin: Huáng jīng) "yellow essence" ("polygonatum; Solomon's Seal") and yuyu 禹餘糧 "Yu's leftover grain" ("limonite").
When they took thistle and nibbled mercury and when they also took pills of brown hematite twice a day, this triple medication produced an increase in breaths, so that they gained the strength to carry loads on long trips, for their bodies became extremely light in weight.
A moment of crisis, however, generally occurs at an early stage when medicines are being taken and starches abandoned and it is only after forty days of progressive weakening, as one uses only holy water and feeds solely on breath, that one regains strength.
When Emperor Jing of Wu (r. 258–264) heard about Shi Chun (Chinese: 石春; pinyin: Shí chūn), a Daoist healer "who would not eat in order to hasten the cure when he was treating a sick person," he exclaimed, "In a short time this man is going to starve to death."
As the Dayou zhang [(Chinese: 大有章; pinyin: Dà yǒu zhāng)] (Verse of Great Existence) says: "The five grains are chisels cutting life away, making the five organs stink and shorten our spans.
What little internalist critique we do find comes quite late — apparently Eastern Han at the earliest — and does not seem well developed: ordinary foods, described as rotten and smelly, impurify a body that must be brought into qi-based resonance with heaven.
Agriculture has also been the main culprit of the imbalances of human civilization over the last ten thousand years or so: the systematic destruction of the natural environment, overpopulation, capitalization, and other evils that result from sedentariness.
Without grains and meat, whoever practices it is undernourished; and the Taoist authors admit that at the beginning one may have numerous troubles, some of them general (vertigo, weakness, sleepiness, difficulties in moving), others local (diarrhea, constipation, and so on).
The recipes for drugs to help in the practice of Abstention from Cereals are numerous: ginseng, cinnamon, pachyma cocos [i.e., Fu Ling], sesame, digitalis, licorice, and all the traditional Chinese tonics play a preponderant role in them.
For instance, the monk Huiyi 慧益 (d. 463), who vowed to burn his body in sacrifice to the Buddha, began preparations by queli "abstaining from grains" (eating only sesame and wheat) for two years, then consumed only oil of thyme, and finally ate only pills made of incense.
Although Emperor Xiaowu of Liu Song (r. 453–464) tried to dissuade Huiyi, he publicly immolated himself in a cauldron full of oil, wearing an oil-soaked cap to act as a wick, while chanting the Lotus Sutra.
[58] Avoiding grains was the primary medical cure for eliminating the sanshi 三尸 "Three Corpses" or sanchong 三蟲 "Three Worms", which are evil spirits believed to live in the human body and hasten death.
"[59] Traditional Chinese medicine links the mythological Three Corpses/Worms with the intestinal jiuchong 九蟲 "Nine Worms", which "correspond to parasites such as roundworms or tapeworms, weaken the host's body and cause a variety of physical symptoms".
The Jinjian yuzi jing 金簡玉字經 "Classic of Jade Characters on Slips of Gold" specifies,[63] "Those who, in their food, cut off cereals must not take wine, nor meat, nor plants of the five strong flavors; they must bathe, wash their garments, and burn incense."
People attend Kōshin-Machi 庚申待 "57th Day Waiting" events to stay awake all night and prevent the Sanshi 三尸 "Three Corpses" from leaving the body and reporting misdeeds to heaven.
The conclusion of recent studies on the harmful effect of excessive amounts of carbohydrates in the form of sugar and bread, have led some to see the Taoist abstinence from cereals as the result of an ancient empiricism in matters of diet.
