Shennong Tastes a Hundred Herbs

Long, long ago, there was one thing people did not know.

It was not how to build a house. It was not how to make a fire. It was whether the leaf in their hand could be eaten.

The forest was full of leaves. Every one was green, every one was soft, and every one had a sharp smell much like the others. Someone could pick up a blade of grass, turn it this way and that, hold it to the light, and crush it in a palm to sniff it. Still there was no way to tell whether it was food, a medicine, or something that must never go in the mouth. There was no one to ask, because the person standing nearby knew no more. There was no book to look in, because no one had yet had time to write one.

But hunger has to be fed. People kept picking and trying, and learned only afterward. In those days, sickness and the poisons in plants did people a great deal of harm.

This not knowing went on day after day, generation after generation. It made no sound at all, yet it pressed down on a whole world.

Then, the old tellers say, out of that vast not knowing, one person stepped forward.

He was called Shennong, a name that means the god of farming.

His story sits in a very old book from China called the Huainanzi, in a chapter known as Xiuwu Xun. A great many scholars at the court of Liu An, the King of Huainan, wrote it together. It was then presented to a young emperor of the Han dynasty, more than 2,000 years ago. The passage about Shennong is only a few lines long. Short as it is, it is hard to forget after a single hearing.

The book says that in the distant past, people ate grasses, drank plain water, picked fruit from the trees, and gathered snails and clams to get by. So Shennong taught people to sow five kinds of seed, which the book calls the five grains. He taught them to look at the land before sowing. This patch was dry, that one was damp. This one was rich, that one was poor. Some ground was high, some was low. Each place suited something different. In other words, he taught people to grow their own food, so they no longer had to run into the forest all day to gather it.

Yet the part that later generations remember him for most is not the sowing.

He went tasting.

He tasted plant after plant, one blade at a time. He tasted the water of the springs too, to learn which ran sweet and which ran bitter. He did not taste for pleasure. He tasted to know, and then to tell everyone else. This one must be avoided. That one is worth seeking. Each plant gave one answer. Each spring gave one answer more.

And here is the line that makes listeners fall quiet. The old book records that on one day he met seventy poisons.

Seventy. In a single day.

Counting slowly from one to seventy already feels long. Seventy times in one day, his tongue told him that what he had just put in his mouth was not safe. Seventy times he fixed that fact in his memory. Then he bent down and picked the next blade.

Those few lines in the old book do not say he managed this by any magic. The beauty of the story lies in something much simpler. Each time he tasted, someone else was spared the tasting. Each harmful thing he learned with his own mouth was one that a mother in the village would never have to learn again.

He kept all the danger for himself and shared the peace of mind with everyone. The gift he left was not any single plant. The gift was knowing.

That is also why the tasting belongs only in the story. Shennong is a god in the tales of the ancients. In real life, no one should taste a strange leaf, blade of grass or fruit from a garden or a field, not even a tiny bit. No one, not ever. His work was done precisely so that, from then on, no one would have to try again. Whatever can be eaten is already on the table today, gathered over many generations and handed down. Tasting an unknown leaf now is not bravery. It would only lead back to the dark time he spent his whole life bringing people out of.

In Vietnam, Shennong is known as Thần Nông. Strangely enough, that name sits on the very first page of the Hồng Bàng story in the old Vietnamese books.

The old chronicle of Vietnam is the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, the Complete Annals of Đại Việt. Its most ancient part is the section on the Hồng Bàng, and that section opens roughly like this. It names Viêm Đế of the Thần Nông clan. His descendant three generations on, it says, was Đế Minh. The book goes on. Đế Minh traveled south on a tour of inspection and reached the region of Ngũ Lĩnh. He became the father of Kinh Dương Vương, who begins the Hồng Bàng line in the old tales.

This is written in an old book and told as a legend, not something that can be measured or proven. But it shows something lovely about stories. The name of that old man who went about tasting plants passed through many generations of tellers, many cooking fires, many evenings. In the end it found its way onto the first page of the Hồng Bàng story in the old books. That is the story of origins that grandparents in Vietnam still tell their grandchildren.

The Vietnamese of old even carried his name up into the sky.

On summer evenings, roughly from June to September, whenever the sky is clear, a cluster of bright stars can be found high in the southern sky. People in Vietnam have long called this cluster the Thần Nông stars. Astronomers today say very plainly that it is not an official constellation. It is a group that people of old put together themselves. Most of its stars belong to the constellation the West calls Scorpius, the Scorpion, with a few more borrowed from the constellation next to it. People of old looked up, joined the stars in their own way, and gave the group a name they held dear.

So tonight, when a hot bowl of rice is carried to the table with fragrant steam still rising, the white grains inside it are worth a moment's thought. They got there through thousands of years of people sowing, trying, remembering, and telling one another. And out there, across the summer sky, there is still a cluster of stars named for an old man who long ago bent down to pick blade after blade, and tasted on behalf of everyone.