Five Cereals (China) - Sacrality

Sacrality

The sense of sacrality regarding Wǔgǔ proceeds from their being traditionally sourced from saintly rulers creating China's foundational culture wholesale. What is being claimed is not merely these culture givers preferring Wǔgǔ among many crops, but that it is because of the Wǔgǔ that agrarian society became possible, marking a profound, legendarily sudden shift from hunter-gatherer and nomadic patterns of life, which surrounding tribes continued to practice, thus making the central and lower Yellow River plains a distinctively settled heartland, a center or middle for those tribes which would come to consider themselves the central Middle Kingdom, or China, and thus as the subjects of the sacred ruler, the Emperor of China. The mythico-political associations of the Five Grains can be seen as early as in the story of Boyi and Shuqi, who as a protest against the overthrow of the Shang Dynasty by the Zhou Dynasty ostentatiously refused to eat the Five Grains. Later the concept of refusing to eat the Five Grains underwent a complex development in the concept of bigu. The sacrality of the Five Grains is underlined by the belief that one of the sins which could lead one to suffer in the afterlife by being sent to Hell was by committing the sin of "squandering the Five Grains".