Life is hard, but man do humans like to keep it going.
The first Chinese emperor swallowed mercury pills to gain immortality.
It didn’t work, but he did die at the early age of 49.
We don’t know if it was mercury poisoning or something else,
but it was definitely mercury poisoning.
Medieval Japanese doctors also struggled with
the life extension problem, and came up with
their own solutions, some of them shocking,
but awesome,
but involve tadpoles.
First we gotta talk about these medieval doctors.
When you go see a doctor, you don’t expect to
find a priest, unless you’re really screwed,
but that’s because you’re not a medieval Japanese.
Nowadays, we see doctors and religious leaders as different people.
One heals the body and the other heals the spirit.
One examines the private parts of your body to cure you, the other is a doctor.
But back then, most doctors were Buddhist monks.
Now there were doctors who kept the Buddhism
out of their practice, they did things like
acupuncture or burning mugwort, but they only
served the imperial family and high ranking nobles in court.
Before modern times, it was monks who treated
health issues for most people, nobles and commoners.
Japan had a long history of fueling China’s tourism industry.
Japanese monks sailed to China whenever they
needed a prescription refill of culture,
bringing back to Japan the latest Buddhist trends,
and a few new Buddhist hells if they were lucky.
They also brought back Chinese medical practices.
Buddhist priest-doctors practiced the ancient Japanese art of copying China.
They were experts in Chinese medicine,
and didn’t mind blending Buddhism into their work.
Now you may be thinking religious cures couldn’t have been that effective,
but neither was Chinese medicine--
There didn’t exist one holy medicine bible that every doctor worshipped,
so one doctor could have treated an STD using acupuncture,
and another could have treated it using prayers.
Dear Buddha, please grant my pp salvation from this itch.
But there were basic principles every doctor knew,
like the Chinese idea of the Five Phases, or Five Agents.
They are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.
Some people also translate them as the Five Elements,
and you should ignore those fools.
They’re inaccurate.
Element describes what a thing is made of,
but this system describes a thing’s character,
and how it interacts with other things.
For example, water strengthens wood, but weakens fire.
I tested this in Pokemon, and it’s true.
These interactions exist for all five phases.
They applied this model to a million different systems, including the body.
They said the body had 5 major organs:
the liver, heart, spleen (and pancreas), lungs, and kidneys,
each one associated with a phase.
It might seem strange that the brain was not
a major organ, but for most of you,
this is pretty accurate.
Different foods nourished different organs.
To live a long life, doctors recommended eating
the right amount of foods to target all five organs equally.
You wanted them balanced.
If the heart got too powerful, it would strengthen the spleen but weaken the lungs.
And those changes would bring more changes, your body becomes a chaotic mess,
and next thing you know, gonna-ree-ya.
Each organ houses a force or spirit.
Each one is super interesting and important,
so we’re gonna ignore all of them except for
jing 精, or sei in Japanese.
Sei means essence, or life force, the energy that keeps your body alive.
Having a lot of say in your body allows you to live a long, healthy, enjoyable life.
It also means spirm.
A person is born with some sei, a battery of life.
The stresses of life like conflict and illness
consume the battery little by little,
but it’s recharged by things like eating, exercising, or meditation.
This is why phones don’t last forever.
Over time, the battery gets less efficient and you have to charge it more often,
and one day your girlfriend looks at the phone while it’s charging
and sees an incriminating text from your ex,
and she throws the phone at the wall.
Conflict is bad for battery life.
Over time, your sei gets used up, that’s why your body gets old.
And when it reaches zero…death.
We’ll talk about the seminal ways to keep the sei inside your body later.
Medical knowledge was not passed around freely to the public.
Clans who specialized in medicine kept that
knowledge locked within the family, like family recipes.
But leaks happen, and there were medical texts
being passed around among nobles, the imperial family,
court doctors, and Buddhist monks.
Japanese Buddhist monks pretty much followed
traditional Chinese medicine, or at the time, Chinese medicine.
They also mixed some Buddhism into the batter
to make a creamy pie of Buddhist healing.
Instruction manuals talked about things like
techniques for circulating qi energy,
moving furniture around for smooth energy flow,
and how to perfume your clothes.
They thought the body was home to a bunch of beneficial spirits,
with names like Bird Genitals, Stinking Lung, and Gulping Bandit.
Chanting their names regularly would prevent
them from escaping and causing illness.
Buddhism in Japan had always been connected with healing and longevity.
When the Mongols invaded [1274, 1281],
temples across the country prayed for the protection
and longevity of the realm.
After beating back the invaders with bows and typhoon,
the shogunate rewarded the country’s defenders.
Temples got rewards just like samurai did, because people thought their prayers were
just as effective as physical weapons.
When Emperor Shōmu got sick, the court
called on 126 “healing meditation masters” to
come and chant, cast spells, beat drums,
light fires, and hang paintings of scary Buddhist gods.
After a while, he got better.
The Chinese and Japanese thought that to live longer,
you had to keep as much sei in you as possible,
not letting it escape.
Remember sei is the body’s essence, or life force.
Because they thought spirm was concentrated sei in physical form,
it led to some fun techniques for extending life.
Or not so fun.
They thought every time you released your tadpoles,
you were letting your life force escape, dummy.
That’s why when men climax, they need to rest a bit before the next session.
Losing so much life energy is exhausting.
There were techniques for climaxing without tadpole release,
because every tadpole is precious.
One common recommendation was for men to practice denial during secks.
You could still enjoy the secks marathon but
you had to stop right before the coming finish line.
Another technique was to climax,
but redirect the tadpoles back inside the body,
so nothing escapes.
A dry climax.
Yep, this can be done regularly with practice, look it up.
They thought this kept the life essence inside the body.
Not only that, it was supposed to send the
essence up into the head, feeding the brain.
It was ideal to never release those tadpoles,
but that was hard to do, literally, even for monks.
It wasn’t uncommon for a monk to get caught with his hand in the pp jar.
So instruction manuals recommended wanking and secks only once in a while,
maybe twice a month.
Practicing these tadpole retention techniques ensured a prolonged life.
The idea of seamen being your body’s life force was a common story trope.
There were plenty of tales of female spirits
seducing men and freeing their little sailors
to drain their life energy.
That’s why you gotta watch out for the kitsune, or the fox spirit.
If one comes near, you better run away, into the bedroom to get ready.
So one day, the shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo
woke up being pounded by headache and crushed by fatigue.
Was it some dreadful disease?
No, worse, he just awoke from an alcohol binger.
Dude had no self control.
To treat his hangover, a Zen monk leader
named Eisai 栄西 prescribed an amazing medicine called tei-ya,
oh tea.
He wrote the shogun a whole document on the benefits of tea.
The history gods call Eisai the father of tea in Japan.
He introduced the Way of Tea to the country, calling it
“the life-nourishing elixir of immortals.”
He said tea was the best medicine for oolong life.
The reason goes back to the Five Phases again.
Each phase is not only associated with an organ, but also with a flavor.
So if you drink something bitter, like tea, it strengthens the heart.
Now within the heart lies a force called shen 神, or in Japanese, shin.
It’s your mind or spirit or soul,
kind of the force that animates a human,
makes people different from zombies.
Therefore, perfectly logically, drinking tea strengthens your heart,
which strengthens your shin, and makes you live longer.
Also, Eisai said that people rarely ate bitter foods, which made for weak hearts.
It was healthy to eat a balanced diet of flavors, to support all the organs equally.
A weak heart caused imbalance and led to health issues.
Tea restored balance, like Anakin.
Eisai, being a Buddhist monk, couldn’t help adding more Buddhist-y things.
Each of the five phases had a specific Buddha,
hand sign, and syllable you had to chant.
He suggested meditation to strengthen your organs,
using their related Buddha, hand sign, and syllable.
Doing this was even more effective than eating a balanced diet.
But even after all this, no one could extend
their lifespan forever, you had to die someday.
The Buddhists had solutions for that too, they offered enlightenment after death.
One of the solutions was to turn women into men.
Click here to see how that worked.
We have a new Emperor on Patreon this week:
StefStef. You’re absolutely awesome.
We also have some regular patrons:
Madeline Moore, Florence, Sidhemail, Aegis, Tia Montal,
LUCE, and Zach Collins.
Thanks so much you guys.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge!