Chapter 3 · 1 / 8
Tea Was Medicine
From the legend of Shennong and the bitter herb 荼 of the Shennong Bencaojing, to Lu Yu settling on the character 茶 in The Classic of Tea. How tea rose out of medicine into a culture of its own.
The lessons are narrated in Japanese.
How to turn on English subtitles
- Start the video and click the CC button to switch captions on.
- Open Settings (the gear icon) → Subtitles/CC → Auto-translate.
- Choose English.
These are machine-translated from the Japanese captions, so expect some roughness — particularly around tea terminology. The text on this page is a proper translation, so read the two together.
Shennong, the legendary emperor of ancient China, is held to be the hero who gave people medicine and agriculture. He is said to have tasted a great many plants in order to identify the useful ones, and when he was poisoned in the course of it, to have chewed tea leaves as an antidote.
This is only a popular story that spread from the Tang period onward, not fact. But it is a fine origin tale, telling us that people in antiquity had found medicinal value in tea. The legend of Shennong putting his own body on the line became the intellectual foundation of the Shennong Bencaojing, the pharmacological text compiled in the Later Han, and the source of its authority.
The Shennong Bencaojing classifies 365 medicinal substances into upper, middle and lower grades, and records their effects and uses. Alongside the Huangdi Neijing and the Shanghan Lun, it is one of the classics of Chinese medicine — an important body of knowledge still consulted today.
Among the upper grade is a substance called kucai, the bitter herb. In the language of the time this was called 荼 (tu), a general term for useful plants marked by bitterness. What fell under 荼 was various: the edible bitter herb, the tea plant recorded as kutu in the Erya, even the reeds used in funerary equipment.
We still say that good medicine tastes bitter, and it is clear that medicinal value was found in strongly bitter useful plants.
Then, in Tang-dynasty China, Lu Yu formally adopted the character 茶 — one stroke fewer than 荼 — in his book The Classic of Tea.
The Classic of Tea set out a systematic method of tea drinking using nothing but the leaves of the tea plant. What until then had been only one part of 荼 was raised into an independent and elevated culture.
Lu Yu, in other words, picked out from the many-sided 荼 the value of tea as a drink, marked it off clearly, made it independent, and so gave it a settled standing.
The tea culture completed in this way in ancient China continued from there, spread across many places, and reaches us in the present.