Why People Went Looking for Medicine in the Forest

Before there were formulas and dosages, there was a much older method: watch, taste, and remember what happens. That method has a name and a founding legend.

Every tradition of materia medica has to start somewhere, before any of it was written down. Someone had to try a plant, notice what it did, and pass that knowledge on before it could become a formula, let alone a book. East Asian medicine has a founding legend for exactly this process, and it explains a surprising amount about how texts like the Donguibogam are structured even today.

Shennong and the hundred herbs

Chinese tradition credits the mythical sage-ruler Shennong (神農, 'Divine Farmer') with personally tasting hundreds of plants to learn which were food, which were medicine, and which were poison — according to legend, testing them on himself one by one. Whatever the historical reality behind the myth, it names something real: materia medica knowledge began as empirical, often risky, trial. The earliest surviving Chinese materia medica text is even named for him, the Shennong Bencao Jing (神農本草經), and its organizing logic — grouping substances by their nature, taste, and toxicity — became the template that later texts, including the Donguibogam's Tangaek-pyeon, would inherit.

Why 'nature, taste, toxicity' became the standard entry

Once you understand the tradition began with tasting, the standard Donguibogam entry format stops looking arbitrary. Recording a substance's nature (性, warm or cold), taste (味), and whether it carries toxicity (毒) is, structurally, a written record of exactly what an early observer would have needed to know before trying something themselves: what will this feel like, and is it safe. Every herb page on this site opens with those same three facts, first, for the same reason they always have.

Why the forest, specifically

Foraging in mountains and forests wasn't a romantic choice — it was where the plants actually were, and Korea's own hyangyak tradition (which we cover in a separate column) depended on people who knew how to find and identify them locally rather than import them. That practical need is also why later traditions developed such specific, careful language around gathering wild plants — including the elaborate culture of the ginseng gatherers we describe in our column on simmani.