Alchemy, Medicine, and Religion in the China of A.D. 320: The Nei P'ien of Ko Hung by Ware James R

Author:Ware, James R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262230223

184 Chapter Eleven

leaves, and its fruit, resembling plums, is purple in color. Twenty- four branchings hang connected with one another like a festoon of pearls.

The white-tally kind is four or five feet tall and resembles the flowering plum tree. It always flowers at Big Snows [December] and forms its fruit in winter. The vermilion species consists of nine bends, each of which has three leaves, with three fruits to a leaf.

The five-virtue one is shaped like a towering hall. Its stem is rectangular, and its leaves are of all colors, but not variegated. The top is like a capital. Within it there is always some nectar, and from a distance of several feet a purple vapor can be observed to rise.

Dragon-bit excrescences, in the second moon of spring, grow in pairs of three longitudinal sections and twelve branchings. The lower root resembles a seated person.

All told, there are 120 species of the herb type, any of which, if dried in the shade and taken, will enable a man to last as long as all nature or live to be one or two thousand years old.

Flesh excrescences. The ten-thousand-year-old hoptoad is said to have horns on its head, while under its chin there is a double-tiered figure 8 written in red. It must be captured at noon on the fifth day of the fifth moon and dried in the shade for a hundred days. A line drawn on the ground with its left root will become a running stream. When its left foreleg is carried on the person, it will ward off all types of weapons. If an enemy shoots at you, the bow and arrow will both turn against the archer. The thousand-year-old bat is as white as snow. When perching, it hangs head down because its brain is heavy. If both of these creatures are obtained, dried in the shade, powdered, and taken, a body can live for forty thousand years.

The thousand-year-old power tortoise is variegated in color. Two bones like horns rise on the forehead of the male. After immersing this animal in sheep’s blood, remove the shell and roast it in a fire. Then grind in a mortar and take an inch-square spoonful three times daily until a whole one has been consumed. You will then live for a thousand years.

If in the mountains you should come across a little man seven or eight inches tall riding in a palanquin or on a horse, it will be a flesh excrescence. By seizing and taking it you will immediately become a genie.

The wind-born animal, resembling a sable, blue in color and the size of a fox, is found in the huge forests of the southern seas and caught by means of nets. Several cartloads of faggots can be used to

roast it, but after these faggots have been consumed, it will be found in the ashes unburned, its fur unscorched. Even an ax blade will not jb pierce it. It will die only after being beaten over the head a thousand times with an iron mace as though it were a leather sack.

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