Lingzhi Mushroom

This is a jade statuette from 18th-century China of a type of mushroom called the _Lingzhi_. It has been used in Chinese Traditional Medicine for over a millennium, and was associated in the religion of Daoism with immortality. The physician Li Shizhen who lived in the 1500s writes that “it positively affects the life energy, or Qi of the heart, repairing the chest area and benefitting those with a knotted tight chest. Taken over a long period of time, the agility of the body will not cease, and the years are lengthened to those of the Immortal Fairies”. That’s some mushroom!.

In fact, Lingzhi is also called reishi, and some versions of it grow locally in the woods of Pennsylvania, where I sadly must report a failure to have seen any Immortal Fairies. But this mushroom has been very important in Chinese culture. Daoist temples were called “the abode of mushrooms”, and the Goddess Guanyin sometimes holds a mushroom in art..