Luo Han Guo, the fruit of the arhat

Luo Han Guo reads “the fruit of the arhat”, the being who has reached awakening in Buddhism; it is also known as monk fruit. A local gazetteer explains the name charmingly: the fruits were said always to grow in groups of eighteen, like the eighteen arhats of Chinese monasteries. It is the dried fruit of a vine of the gourd family, Siraitia grosvenorii, which climbs the shaded, misty slopes of subtropical mountains. Its reference terroir is Guangxi, around Guilin: Yongfu county, “China’s homeland of Luo Han Guo”, together with its neighbours supplies around ninety per cent of world production. Long a folk use of the Yao people, it entered the Chinese Pharmacopoeia only in 1977, then the list of dual-status substances, both food and medicinal plant.

Cooling while moistening

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the fruit is cool and has a single, purely sweet flavour, a sweetness without equal in the pharmacopoeia. Now sweet generates the Fluids and moistens: sweet and cool, with no bitterness to dry and no cold to harm the Middle. Where the herbs that cool the Lung are generally bitter and dry out what they cool, this one cools while moistening. The fruit is linked with the Lung, which opens into the throat, and with the Large Intestine, its paired organ: it moistens both, and also helps transit stay free, without forcing anything.

From the Lung to the Large Intestine

The Lung meridian runs through the throat, and it is here that the fruit is best known in southern China: regional tradition makes it the infusion of those who speak and sing for a living, teachers, singers, speakers. Through the Large Intestine, the Lung’s paired organ, its sweetness also returns fluid to the lower body: it stimulates nothing, it moistens. It is cracked open, shell and seeds included, and infused in boiling water, several times in a row; with sterculia seed, it forms a classic Lung pair. Modern research takes a particular interest in mogrosides, the source of its sweet taste.