Decades of Phlegm-Dampness Garbage Stuck in Your Stomach? Zhu Danxi’s Dao Cang Fa (the “Emptying the Granary” Method): A Bowl of Yellow Beef Soup That Cured His Teacher’s Paralysis

Opening: a treatment that beggars belief

In the history of Chinese medicine there is one treatment method that is genuinely strange: buy dozens of jin of yellow beef, boil it until it falls apart, strain out the broth, slowly reduce it over a low fire until it turns the color of amber — then drink it bowl after bowl, drink until you vomit, drink until you purge — flushing out everything that has piled up inside your belly. The method has a wonderfully vivid name: Dao Cang Fa — the “Emptying the Granary” method. It turns the body — that “granary” — completely upside down and sweeps it clean.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: This method sounds terrifying, but it really happened — and the man it cured was no ordinary person. He was Xu Wenyi Gong, the direct heir of Zhu Xi’s teaching, the torchbearer of Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism. Doctor Zhu Danxi recorded it with his own hand: his teacher’s stubborn illness of decades was cured by exactly this method. Today, let’s tell the whole story and explain the whole method, from beginning to end.

Who was the patient? — The heir of Zhu Xi, a great scholar lecturing in the mountains

This Xu Wenyi Gong was named Xu Qian, courtesy name Yizhi. He was the direct heir of Zhu Xi, the standard-bearer of Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism, and a man of enormous scholarly standing. In those days he came to lecture in the mountains near Doctor Zhu Danxi’s hometown. Doctor Zhu Danxi heard that such a famous teacher had arrived, and went along to listen — in fact, so many people went that it became a trend.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: That one lecture changed Doctor Zhu Danxi’s life completely. He later said that before, he had lived in a muddle; hearing this teaching, he was suddenly enlightened. He threw himself into the study of Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucianism and Confucian thought, and his scholarship advanced rapidly — he soon became a noted Confucian scholar in his own right. Doctor Zhu Danxi had real standing in the Confucian world — after all, he too traced his lineage back to Zhu Xi.

Later, Doctor Zhu Danxi tried the civil service examinations and failed — and fell into a deep personal crisis. It was then that Xu Qian, watching this exceptionally bright student, said to him: “If you put your intelligence into medicine, you should achieve something.” Doctor Zhu Danxi listened to his teacher, burned his examination books, threw them away, and began studying medicine in earnest.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: This was the turning point of Doctor Zhu Danxi’s life. After he took up medicine he felt his learning was insufficient, so he traveled far and wide seeking masters. He heard that Doctor Luo Zhiti in Hangzhou was formidable, and went to study under him — and in the end he became one of the great physicians of his age, for Doctor Luo Zhiti passed on everything he knew to him. Finally, it was Doctor Zhu Danxi himself who cured his teacher Xu Wenyi Gong. Whether he treated the teacher before or after studying under Luo Zhiti, the records disagree: some biographies say it happened after he returned from his studies, other sources calculate it was before he went to Hangzhou — scholars still debate it. We need not dig into that; what matters is the illness and the treatment.

The teacher’s illness: decades of chest pain, growing worse with every treatment

Doctor Zhu Danxi recorded his teacher’s illness very clearly: shi bing xin tong — it began as pain in the chest (what the ancients called “heart pain” could also have been stomach pain; the location is roughly that region). The physicians of the time all used warming, heating herbs — clove (ding xiang), aconite (fu zi), cinnamon bark (rou gui), cinnamon twig (gui zhi), fresh ginger (sheng jiang), dried ginger (gan jiang) — and treated him for a long time without success.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: And this treatment went on for decades! It not only failed to cure him, it created new problems: his feet cramped and drew up, the spasms pulled upward and hurt terribly; he feared cold; and he was constantly vomiting things up. In the end, all kinds of mineral elixirs were tried, and moxibustion was applied without stint — more than a hundred thousand moxa cones of moxa fire, burned on him whenever there was a spare moment. On top of that he was “miscellaneously treated” for several more years, and the pain only grew worse. Xu Wenyi Gong himself concluded: it’s over, I’m a ruined man. His feet were so cramped he could not walk, and he was cold and vomiting — you can imagine this great scholar continuing to lecture through all that suffering, with so many students coming to hear him, while he himself was in agony.

Later he became restless and could not eat; the sight of food made him nauseous. Someone gave him Tong Sheng San (the Meridian-Unblocking Powder), and he took it for about half a month — the purging was intensely painful, with tenesmus (li ji hou zhong) — an urgent urge to strain with a heavy dragging sensation — and even after the purge it still hurt, the anus burning hot as if on fire. What came out was every color imaginable, like a piece of five-colored rotting brocade, including things that looked like lumps of beef tallow.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Who prescribed that Tong Sheng San? The case record doesn’t say in detail — it could have been Doctor Zhu Danxi himself, or another physician. But the course of events is recorded clearly: after taking it, the body was “released both internally and externally,” some stool came out, and the illness seemed to retreat a little. Half a month later he wanted to eat again — but both feet still would not move, and ji wu suo chu — nobody had any idea what to do next. So you see, an illness of decades cannot be resolved by a single dose of medicine; all the earlier tossing and turning was preparation for the true method that came later.

The following March, Doctor Zhu Danxi acted: the Dao Cang Fa

In March of the following year, Doctor Zhu Danxi applied that method to his teacher — the Dao Cang Fa. What happened? Jie jie ru ying — step by step, everything responded. His body changed at once; yin de wei quan ren — the man who had believed himself a cripple became a complete, whole, normal person again!

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: And the wonderful part comes after: the following year, the old gentleman fathered another son. Fourteen more years passed, and he died peacefully at a great old age. Doctor Zhu Danxi extended his teacher’s life, cured his illness, restored his body — and even added a child to his household. What immense merit! And there is one especially moving detail from Xu Wenyi Gong’s deathbed: Doctor Zhu Danxi hurried to his side; the teacher was already failing, and Doctor Zhu Danxi said only one sentence: “Teacher, your gaze has gone a little crooked.” Xu Wenyi Gong immediately straightened his eyes, and then closed them. The ancients prized uprightness their whole lives; even at the very end, he did not want to leave behind a crooked impression — master and student understood each other with a single phrase. Every time I read this detail, it moves me.

What exactly is the Dao Cang Fa? — First, the reasoning

Doctor Zhu Danxi’s exposition of the Dao Cang Fa is extremely detailed. He said: every day we eat food, and the spleen and stomach receive it, contain it, and transform it — working hard every single day. People eat the five grains and all kinds of foods, and some people gorge themselves, stuffing every kind of food in. If transformation is normal, what should be absorbed is absorbed and what should be expelled is expelled, and the spleen and stomach always stay clean. But who among today’s people eats normally?

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Doctor Zhu Danxi’s original text is very clear: “Yu shi kou zhi wu, ning wu guo liang er shang ji zhi hu?” — “When you meet food that suits your taste, can you truly guarantee you won’t eat too much and wound yourself?” Plenty of people overeat, and the food stagnation stays inside. Add to that qi qing zhi pian — the seven emotions driven to extremes, with emotional ups and downs wounding the spleen and stomach — and wu wei zhi pian — biased diets, some people eating nothing but spicy food, others nothing but fatty meat. All of this wounds the chong he zhi qi — the clear, harmonious qi of the spleen and stomach. And so: food stagnation blocks the middle, water-dampness stops and cannot transform into qi, it congeals with the waste that was never expelled into phlegm, and that in turn leaves blood stasis behind — water-dampness, phlegm, food stagnation, and blood stasis all entangle each other, piling up day after day, year after year, until the spleen, stomach, and intestines are clogged into chaos, and the body begins to fail.

The key sentence is this: the spleen governs the four limbs (pi zhu si zhi). When the spleen and stomach fail, the four limbs fail with them — that is why Xu Wenyi Gong’s legs could not move: the root lay in decades of accumulated garbage in his spleen and stomach. What to do? Push it out. Clean it out.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: For ordinary illness, the digestive, stagnation-resolving formulas — Bao He Wan (Harmony-Preserving Pill), Yue Ju Wan (Stagnation-Resolving Pill) and the like — can dissolve the various depressed pathogens; Doctor Zhu Danxi was especially good at these. But his teacher’s illness was not simple: decades upon decades of accumulation. Think about it — Xu Wenyi Gong was a great scholar; his disciples supported him, so his table must have been quite good. Day after day, how much could pile up? Ordinary stagnation-resolving herbs could never budge it, which is why the Dao Cang Fa — a full “spring cleaning” — was needed.

How do you do the Dao Cang Fa? — A bowl of amber-colored beef soup

The method is quite interesting. First, buy yellow beef — the meat of a yellow-haired cow, choosing a plump, fatty cut, buying ten to twenty jin (for most people a bit over ten jin is plenty). Boil it in chang liu shui — running, living water, never stagnant water — until it is extremely well done. Then strain it through cloth, discarding the dregs, and keep the broth. Return the broth to the pot and reduce it slowly over a low flame, concentrating it until it reaches the color of amber — a yellowish, translucent depth. Then it is ready.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Then you begin drinking: bowl by bowl — drink one bowl, wait a while, then drink a second bowl, and so on for dozens of bowls (dozens of small cupfuls). In summer it is fine as is; in winter you must always warm it before drinking. After it goes down — when the disease sits above, you vomit more; when it sits below, you purge more; when it sits in the middle burner, you do both, vomiting and purging plenty. Usually a person vomits first, and after vomiting, purges. What comes out lets an experienced physician see where the disease had lodged. You keep going until the purging runs clean.

After the vomiting and purging are finished, move into a room that keeps out drafts but lets in light. When you are thirsty — and you will be — you must not drink soup or broth. What do you drink instead? — Lun Hui Jiu, the “reincarnation wine”: your own urine, one or two bowls.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: This “reincarnation wine” is what people today call Hui Long Tang (“Dragon-Returning Soup”) — urine therapy. It once enjoyed a great vogue worldwide, and especially in China, and the people who promoted it most ardently were largely descendants of Zhu Xi — Zhu Xi’s lineage ran precisely through Xu Wenyi Gong, so there may be some connection with Doctor Zhu Danxi here. Zhu Xi’s descendants worldwide number roughly half a million, and a portion of them revere the practice of Hui Long Tang for health, and their health really is not bad. Why? Urine does contain some waste, but it also carries certain hormone-like substances the body has excreted — we won’t analyze it further; it is their own health practice. Doctor Zhu Danxi records it plainly: drink one or two bowls — it not only quenches thirst, it also flushes out the last of the garbage.

Then sleep; rest for a day or two. When you feel hungry, drink a little porridge. After three days, cook vegetables until soft and eat them with the porridge. After half a month you will surely be full of spirit, light and clear in body — the body unburdened, and the old illness gone. One caution: for the five years after, you must not eat beef — beef is forbidden, Doctor Zhu Danxi specifically insisted on this.

Where did the method come from? — From the Western Regions; the Arabs have a similar tradition

Doctor Zhu Danxi himself said the Dao Cang Fa came from the Western Regions (xi yu) — a master over there had passed the method on. Looking at it today, the Arabs have something very similar.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: In One Thousand and One Nights there is a passage about the Arabs of the desert edge, who periodically eat something and then squat down to purge; when finished, they move to another spot and purge again, and afterward their bodies feel light and they consider themselves cured — that really is a tradition of that region. Some say it is an ancient Indian method, but India does not eat much beef, so Arabia is the likelier source. The method is famous in history; whenever people talk about Zhu Danxi, they talk about this case.

Has anyone actually tried it? — A Korean professor’s firsthand experiment

The method sounds mystical — but someone really did try it, and the person who tried it was no ordinary man.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: In Shanghai there was a professor, a Korean student of Chinese medicine, who at the time served as general manager of a Korean trading company in Shanghai. He admired Doctor Zhu Danxi enormously and thought the method was remarkable; he himself happened to be attending far too many business dinners, had grown fat, and felt his vitality declining. So he gave in to his experimental spirit — he bought fifteen jin of New Zealand beef, cooked it exactly the way Doctor Zhu Danxi described, boiled it to shreds, strained it, and then gulped down the equivalent of several meals’ worth. He drank, he vomited; after vomiting he purged — and he could not believe how much came out, in every color imaginable! Afterward he followed Doctor Zhu Danxi’s aftercare exactly. His first impressions: his weight dropped — beautifully — and his energy returned. Back in Korea he repeated it several times more. Later his teacher met him again and remarked that the student’s white hair had turned black again, and his complexion was rosy — his whole body was in superb condition. He even gave his own wife a try once.

Why did later doctors almost never dare to use it? — The key is pattern discrimination

The method works, yet very few later physicians attempted it. Why? Doctor Luo gives two reasons.

First, the hardest hurdle is drinking the soup. Dozens of bowls of concentrated beef broth — it really is not delicious. It takes extraordinary courage, and ordinary people cannot bear it.

Second, some people used it and things went wrong — the root cause was failure to discriminate the pattern.

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Doctor Zhu Danxi treated his teacher for paralysis — both feet wasted and immovable. Later physicians saw this: “Since the Dao Cang Fa cured paralysis, let’s give it to stroke patients, cerebral hemorrhage patients, too!” And the moment they did — danger. Why? Every method in Chinese medicine must be applied according to pattern discrimination (bian zheng lun zhi)! Who does the Dao Cang Fa suit? People with stagnation and accumulation in the stomach and intestines: those who eat richly, with food stagnation inside, fire flaring upward all day, phlegm, blood stasis, dampness, and food stagnation piled up in the spleen and stomach — this is a yu yu zhi zheng, an excess pattern (shi zheng). Look at such a person’s tongue: the coating is certainly thick and greasy, the tongue body red, the body in a state of overnutrition. Flush it out, clear away the clogging garbage, and of course he gets better. Xu Wenyi Gong, for all that decades of illness had weakened him, was at bottom still an excess picture — phlegm, blood stasis, dampness, and food stagnation piled in the spleen and stomach, substance. But some deficiency patterns (xu zheng) — qi and blood both exhausted, especially stroke patients with cerebral hemorrhage whose qi is already too weak to hold on — cannot bear such an upheaval; it easily becomes dangerous. So when later doctors used it rashly and people got hurt, the warning went out: “The Dao Cang Fa must not be used casually — anyone who uses it invites disaster.” But the fault was not the method — it was not matching the pattern. Match it, and clearing out the garbage leaves the body healthier and healthier; mismatch it, and the patient cannot endure it. Add the fact that the vomiting and purging genuinely hurt, and that modern patients are unwilling to put themselves through such an ordeal — and so the method slowly fell out of use.

Ending: the importance of the spleen and stomach is the real point of this story

The Dao Cang Fa is a classic episode in Chinese medicine, and when used correctly it works remarkably well. But in studying this story, what we learn is not to go drinking beef soup — we learn a principle:

💬 Note from Doctor Luo: Always protect the chong he zhi qi — the clear, harmonious qi of the spleen and stomach — and let it run its normal course. Don’t pile garbage into your own spleen and stomach: food stagnation, phlegm-dampness, blood stasis — pile them all in there, and the body runs into every kind of trouble, even, as with Xu Wenyi Gong, so severely that the legs can no longer move. This is how important the spleen and stomach are to human health. Everything we eat each day, the spleen and stomach receive and transform with hard work; treat them well, and they treat you well. Doctor Zhu Danxi’s story has been told for hundreds of years, and read today, every word of it is still plain, honest advice for living well.

What to take away

1. The Dao Cang Fa is real and it worked — Doctor Zhu Danxi cured his teacher Xu Wenyi Gong, paralyzed by decades of accumulated phlegm-dampness, food stagnation, and blood stasis, with bowls of concentrated yellow beef broth that made him vomit and purge.
2. The mechanism is straightforward — when the spleen and stomach are clogged with years of undigested residue, ordinary stagnation-resolving herbs cannot budge it; sometimes a thorough physical cleaning is the only way.
3. Pattern discrimination decides everything — the method suits the excess pattern: thick greasy tongue coating, red tongue, an overnourished body with food and dampness piled up inside. For deficiency patterns — qi and blood both exhausted, stroke with cerebral hemorrhage — it is dangerous. This is why later doctors feared it: not the method, but the misuse.
4. The aftercare matters as much as the purge — rest in a draft-free, light room, drink only your own urine (the “reincarnation wine”) to quench thirst and flush the rest, progress from thin porridge to soft vegetables over half a month, and eat no beef for five years.
5. The real lesson is prevention — keep the harmonizing qi of the spleen and stomach healthy; don’t let food stagnation, phlegm, dampness, and blood stasis pile up inside. The spleen governs the four limbs — when the middle is clogged, even the legs can stop working.
6. Treat your spleen and stomach well — every bite you take is received and transformed by them with hard work; treat them kindly, and they will treat you kindly.

Compiled from Doctor Luo Dalun’s lecture series on Doctor Zhu Danxi. The original case is recorded in Doctor Zhu Danxi’s own writings; the Dao Cang Fa itself is traditionally said to have come from the Western Regions.