Bencao House
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Food as medicine

Reishi

灵芝Líng Zhī

四气 Nature
Neutral · 平
五味 Flavour
Sweet · Bitter
归经 Channels
Heart · Lung · Liver · Kidney
Shared-origin list
Added November 2023

Reishi is a woody, bitter-sweet shelf fungus, neutral in nature, associated with the Heart, Lung, Liver and Kidney channels. The Shennong Bencao Jing, c. 200 CE, describes six coloured zhi in its upper class. It is not food in the ordinary sense — it is simmered for its liquid — and China only added it to the shared-origin catalogue in November 2023.

A single dried reishi bracket fungus, lacquered mahogany top surface, photographed on warm plaster.
Ganoderma lucidum · Dried fruiting body, sliced

Ganoderma lucidum

四气 · Nature

  1. cold
  2. cool
  3. neutral
  4. warm
  5. hot
Leans neither way

五味 · Flavour

sour
Gathers and holdsLiver
bitter
Drains and driesHeart
sweet
Fills, slows, harmonisesSpleen
pungent
Disperses and movesLung
salty
Softens and sends downKidney
归经 Channels
Heart · Lung · Liver · Kidney
Part used
Dried fruiting body, sliced
Shared-origin list
Added November 2023

In the canon

What the texts say

The Shennong Bencao Jing, c. 200 CE, does not list one reishi. It lists six, sorted by colour — the blue, the red, the yellow, the white, the black and the purple 芝 — and gives each its own entry in the upper class of the 365. The red one, 赤芝, is the one sold today. The colour scheme is a Han-dynasty cosmological one rather than a mycological one, and modern Chinese pharmacopoeia has quietly collapsed it into a single species.

Shennong Bencao JingThe Divine Husbandman’s Classic of Materia Medicac. 200 CE

Bitter and neutral. It settles what is knotted in the chest, and eaten over a long time it lightens the body.

Upper class — the red zhi

The same entry goes on to promise immortality. We are quoting it because it is the earliest written record of this fungus and not because we believe the last clause, and it is worth saying that Li Shizhen did not believe it either. When he came to the zhi in the Bencao Gangmu of 1596 — juan 28, filed with the fungi — he complained that the Daoists had turned them into auspicious omens and that a herbal is not the place for omens. Four hundred years later that is still the most useful sentence written about reishi.

Bencao GangmuThe Compendium of Materia Medica1596
Juan 28, among the fungi

What the tradition actually uses reishi for is narrower than the packets suggest. It is grouped with the substances that settle the spirit — 安神, to quiet the shen — alongside things like sour jujube seed and poria. Sleep that is light, a mind that carries on working after the body has stopped, a tiredness that has a wired edge to it: that is the shape of the picture reishi belongs to.

It is also the newest item on this list. China only added reishi to the catalogue of substances that count as both food and medicine in November 2023, alongside astragalus and seven others. Before that it was a herb. That recency is a reason to be careful, not a reason to be impressed.

In a kitchen

How it is actually used

Reishi is wood. You cannot eat it, and nothing about it is pleasant on first meeting: the liquid is dark, resinous and properly bitter, in the way strong coffee without milk is bitter. Chinese kitchens deal with this by simmering it long and sweetening it with dates rather than by hiding it. Buy it sliced. Whole caps need a saw.

Reishi and date decoction

Three small cups50 minutes

5 g · 4–5 slices
Dried reishi, sliced thin
750 ml · 3 cups
Cold water
20 g · 4 whole
Dried red jujubes, split to the stone
3 slices
Fresh ginger, optional, if you run cold
  1. Rinse the reishi slices quickly under cold water and put them in a small pot with the cold water. Start from cold — it draws more out of the wood than dropping it into boiling water.
  2. Bring it up slowly and hold it at a bare simmer, lid ajar, for forty minutes. The liquid should go the colour of strong tea and reduce by about a third.
  3. Add the split dates for the last ten minutes. They go in late so they sweeten the liquid without turning it thick.
  4. Strain, and drink it warm in small cups across an evening rather than in one go. It is bitter, and it is meant to be.

The slices can take a second pot of water; Chinese households usually simmer the same reishi twice and throw it away after. If the bitterness defeats you, a spoon of honey stirred in once it has cooled below scalding is normal practice and does not ruin anything.

Who it is for

Who it suits, and who it does not

Reishi is the item on this list we are most conservative about. It is neutral in nature, so it does not push a body hot or cold, but it is pharmacologically busy in a way that a jujube is not, and the list of people it does not suit is longer than the list for anything else here.

Tends to suit

  • Sleep that is light and easily broken, night after night.
  • A mind that carries on running long after you have gone to bed.
  • Tiredness with a wired, unrestful quality rather than a heavy one.
  • Long stretches of stress that have not let up.

Tends not to suit

  • Pregnancy, or feeding an infant.
  • Anyone taking an anticoagulant or antiplatelet medication.
  • Anyone on medication that manages an immune condition, or after a transplant.
  • The two weeks before any planned surgery.
  • Blood pressure that already runs low.

Honestly

What to know before you start

The reading

Reishi suits some people and not others

This page describes a food. It cannot tell you whether it belongs in your week, because it knows nothing about how you sleep, eat or feel the cold. A reading does: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English by a physician licensed in China for US $39, sent within 48 hours.

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