Description

This paper was written to gather, as much as possible, the scattered and often contradictory lore of an elusive practice rooted in ancient China. The materials available on the subject seem incomplete and are largely unavailable in English or online or are hidden amongst larger works on Daoism or China. I make no claim to any original scholarship on the subject, but hope that it may humbly aid those interested in but who are lacking access to certain texts. I was going to entitle this paper with the rather “on the nose” Against the Grain as it subtly expresses the Daoist paradox of integrating with a higher order rather than “going with the grain” of society both in metaphors of food and carpentry. But there is a diet book on the subject entitled “Against the Grain” and well-argued books on agricultural “creation of culture of scarcity” (Manning 2005) and many articles on various subjects with that title with which I did not want to be “unequally yoked.” The Wade-Giles/Pinyin situation is usually dependent on the author cited.