Eating Your Way to Immortality: Early Daoist Self-Cultivation Diets

Abstract

This paper examines health- and body-related claims made in the Lingbao Wufuxu (The Preface to the Five Lingbao Talismans of Numinous Treasure), an early medieval Daoist text that contains seventy recipes for attaining health, longevity, and spiritual benefit. Synthesizing the text’s myriad claims and analyzing their implicit assumptions, I work to develop an integrated picture of what was considered crucial for a healthy body, what techniques were used to attain this ideal, and what goals were sought using these practices. I examine the text’s claims about becoming physically and spiritually healthy, its proposed stages of purification and refinement, and the range of indicators by which adherents can measure progress toward their ideal state. Not only does this study provide a new interpretation of the Wufuxu ’s dietary regimens, it also illustrates how Chinese medical theories influenced the text’s authors to present immortality as a logical evolution of health-perfecting practices. This analysis leads to questions of how the idea of perfecting one’s health functions within the worldview and ritual practices of early Daoists.