Yangsheng, nourishing life, is a category with no clean Western equivalent because it sits across medicine, religion and ordinary prudence. It covers sleep and its timing, diet by season and constitution, breathing, moderate exercise, the regulation of sexual activity, emotional temperance, and the avoidance of extremes of heat, cold, exertion and feeling. The literature is continuous with Chinese medicine — Sun Simiao, the seventh-century physician whose Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold is a foundational medical text, is venerated as the King of Medicine with temples of his own. The important structural point is the refusal of asceticism: Taoism has never accepted that harming or despising the body advances anything, and this is where it diverges most sharply from monastic Buddhism, from Indian austerity traditions and from Christian mortification. Even Quanzhen's renunciation is framed as removing distraction and preserving essence, not as punishing the flesh.