Shennong is one of the legendary ancestors of the Chinese nation. He’s also known as the Yan Emperor of the Three Emperors and Five Sovereigns in ancient China. He is believed to have taught people how to identify different kinds of plants and how to grow crops so as to survive and bring up children.

The beautiful legend of Shennong tasting hundreds of herbs shows that Shennong discovered Chinese medicine. It is said that in order to relieve people of afflictions and sufferings, Shennong decided to taste all plants to find out herbs with medicinal effects and capable of curing diseases.

In the legend, Shennong had a transparent stomach and things eaten could be clearly seen in the stomach. With this extraordinary feature, Shennong could tell which plants had medicinal effects or poisonous elements. After going through all kinds of hardships and difficulties, Shennong tasted all herbs and ended up losing his life to poisonous herbs. He sacrificed his own life in order to save all others. To commemorate him, people honored him as “Medicine Buddha”.  

For thousands of years, Shennong’s great spirit of “benefiting and rescuing people” have been highly respected and praised. It was this very spirit that spurred a lot of great physicians and pharmacologists of later ages like Bian Que, Li Shizhen and Sun Simiao to make unremitting efforts to carry on the great tradition of “saving the people and serving the society” in Chinese medicine, bringing it to a great height of development.