The religious and medicinal uses of Cannabis

The earliest trace of cannabis use is an archaeological find of hemp textile in China dating from 4000 B.C. (Li & Lin 1974). Hemp thread and rope from 3000 B.C. have also been found in Chinese-occupied Turkestan (Fisher 1975). The Rh-Ya (500 B.C., but pointing back many centuries earlier) mentions its use for fiber (Bouquet 1950), as do the Shih-Ching (lOth-7th centuries B.C.), the Li-Chi (100 B.C.) and the Chou Li (c. 200 B.C.) (Li & Lin 1974). A grain crop was obtained from the achene as well, according to the latter three classics (Li & Lin 1974), though the earliest archaeological evidence of this use found to date is from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.). Cannabis grain was not merely an auxiliary crop, for in ancient times it was counted as one of the "five grains, " together with rice, barley, millet and soy beans (Li 1975). To this day a large seeded variety of hemp grows in the far northeast of China, which may well be a relict of its use for grain. Although cannabis ceased to be an important food in China just before the beginning of the Christian era due to the introduction of new crops (Keng 1974), it is still a source of cooking oil and grain in parts of Nepal. There is a peculiar silence on its psychotropic properties in the old scripts, which has led most people to believe that the ancient Chinese were unaware of them. Li, however, notes that inscriptions from the eastern Chou Dynasty (700-500 B.C.) have a "negative " connotation accompanying the archaic character for cannabis, Ma, which implies a stupefying effect (Li &amp