Shennong

Shennong (Chinese: 神農; pinyin: Shénnóng), variously translated as "Divine Farmer" or "Divine Husbandman", born Jiang Shinian (姜石年), was a mythological Chinese ruler known as the first Yan Emperor who has become a deity in Chinese folk religion. He is venerated as a culture hero in China.

Shennong has at times been counted amongst the Three Sovereigns (also known as "Three Kings" or "Three Patrons"), a group of ancient deities or deified kings of prehistoric China. Shennong has been thought to have taught the ancient Chinese not only their practices of agriculture, but also the use of herbal medicine. Shennong was credited with various inventions: these include the hoe, plow (both leisi (耒耜) style and the plowshare), axe, digging wells, agricultural irrigation, preserving stored seeds by using boiled horse urine (to ward off the borers), trade, commerce, money, the weekly farmers market, the Chinese calendar (especially the division into the 24 jieqi or solar terms). He is also attributed to have refined the therapeutic understanding of taking pulse measurements, acupuncture, and moxibustion, as well as having instituted the harvest thanksgiving ceremony (zhaji (蜡祭) sacrificial rite, later known as the laji (腊祭) rite).

"Shennong" can also be taken to refer to his people, the Shennong-shi (神農氏; Shénnóngshì; 'Shennong Clan').

According to legend, Shennong's mother swallowed the vapor of a dragon and nine days later, her son was born on the banks of the river Jiang. He had a bull (or ox's) head with a man's body. He developed rapidly and began speaking after three days, eventually growing to over eight feet tall.

In Chinese mythology, he obtained a mystical book of herbs from a Taoist master and later journeyed across China to record 365 medicinal herbs and fungi that became essential in traditional Chinese medicine. Shennong also taught humans the use of the plow, aspects of basic agriculture, and the use of cannabis. Possibly influenced by the Yan Emperor mythos or the use of slash-and-burn agriculture, Shennong was a god of burning wind. He was also sometimes said to be a progenitor to, or to have had as one of his ministers, Chiyou (and like him, was ox-headed, sharp-horned, bronze-foreheaded, and iron-skulled).

Shennong is also thought to be the father of the Yellow Emperor (黃帝) who carried on the secrets of medicine, immortality, and making gold. According to the eighth century AD historian Sima Zhen's commentary to the second century BC Shiji (or, Records of the Grand Historian), Shennong is a kinsman of the Yellow Emperor and is said to be an ancestor, or a patriarch, of the ancient forebears of the Chinese.

After the Zhou dynasty, Shennong was thought to have existed within it by some "ancient Chinese historians" and religious practitioners as the "deified" form of "mythical wise king" Hou Ji whose descendants later founded the Zhou.

As an alternative to this view, Shennong was also thought of in the era of the Hundred Schools of Thought as a culture hero rather than a god, but one with a supernatural digestive system who ate a specimen of every single plant that existed in the time of the Hundred Schools to find which ones were edible by humans. In the third century BCE, during times of political crisis and expansionism and wars among Chinese kingdoms, Shennong received new myths about his status as an ideal prehistoric ruler who valued laborers and farmers and "ruled without ministers, laws or punishments."