Tea and Chinese Medicine

Chinese herbal medicine was an established profession more than 2,000 years ago, and it is therefore easy to see why this humble leaf—found to be so beneficial to the body, mind, and spirit—would eventually make its way through the countryside and beyond to other provinces outside Yunnan. Many of the early healers were the very same Taoist mendicants, which made a living by gathering and selling herbs or treating illness. They had come to replace the shamans before them, practicing more than just meditation or retreat. Some sages did retreat completely from the “World of Dust,” living self-sufficient lives of contemplation deep in the forest or mountains, but those nearer to villages and towns all tended to be healers of some kind. In such olden days, tea masters sometimes referred to tea as “Chang Shen Dan (長生丹),” or “Longevity Medicine,” and the men who used it to cure “Tea Doctors (茶醫),” both of which are names I wish could be resurrected, connecting tea and the men that have healed so many of my worst days to these ancient periods of natural, holistic medicine—when health wasn’t just an adjustment of the body alone, but a complete alignment of the body, mind, and spirit even onto and beyond the threshold of death, which wasn’t a “failure” of a machine that was improperly adjusted, but a natural and indispensable aspect of the Way we all journey.

This chain of thoughts, for me, unlocks another of the insights I find in reverie of tea and its long relationship with man: That saying tea was either “medicine” or “meditation” to the ancients isn’t really calling it two separate brews, as “medicine” to them was also something spiritual, and “healing” a lot more than just a mundane swill of bitter soup for the sake of more regular digestion or blood pressure. Similarly, Native Americans used the word “medicine” to refer to anything with spirit, magic, or power, suggesting that healing and meditation/prayer weren’t separate spheres of life; and their shamans were even called “medicine men.” As even a cursory survey of the history of medicine would show, the separation of the healing arts from the spirit is a very modern innovation, and one that some holistic doctors are starting to rethink in terms of what “health” really means. To be healthy, in the truest sense—“healthy” as only a human has the potential to be—we must have harmony between all the various forces that we are made of, corporeal and incorporeal both; and in this, like so many other things, our predecessors in tea understood quite clearly; for what is “longevity” without the wisdom so many years might grant us? And what is a physical “cure” but a temporary reprieve before the onset of yet another, greater illness?