Lion's Mane: The Mushroom Monks Used for 500 Years | Mindfuel Flow
"The mind is like water. When it is turbulent, it is difficult to see. When it is calm, everything becomes clear." — Chan Buddhist teaching, Tang Dynasty
There is a small, dense mushroom that looks almost comically wrong. White, shaggy, dangling from hardwood trees like a frozen waterfall. It has about fifteen common names depending on which part of the world you're in. Biologists call it Hericium erinaceus. In Japan it's called yamabushitake, the mountain hidden mushroom. In China, houtou, the monkey head mushroom. You may have encountered it recently under a different name entirely: Lion's Mane, a Western label that came much later, named simply for what it looks like. You might have thought: is this new?
It is absolutely not new.
Ancient China: a royal delicacy and a tool for the mind
The earliest recorded use of Hericium erinaceus dates to the Tang Dynasty in China (618 to 907 AD), where it was prepared as a tonic for emperors and members of the imperial court. It was considered one of the Four Noble Mushrooms, alongside poria, reishi, and tremella, each prized not just for flavour but for what they were believed to do to the person who consumed them.
By the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 AD), it had been codified into the pharmacopoeial tradition. Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica, arguably the most comprehensive traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia ever compiled and finished around 1578, describes it in detail. Li Shizhen noted that regular consumption of houtou benefits the five internal organs, aids digestion, and fortifies the constitution. The preparation? Ground to powder, mixed with hot water. Not so different from today.
The Chinese were not dosing this randomly. They observed patterns. People who consumed it regularly appeared to maintain sharper recall in old age. Monks in extended meditation retreats reported sustaining concentration for longer. They were noticing something real, though they had no way to describe it in terms we would recognise.
Japan: the monks who hid in the mountains
The name yamabushitake comes from the Yamabushi, a sect of Japanese Buddhist monks associated with Shugendo, a tradition blending Buddhism, Shintoism, and Taoism involving austere mountain asceticism. These monks wore distinctive robes covered in fur, a deliberate echo of the mountain creatures they sought to emulate. Reaching spiritual clarity required sustained concentration over long periods of seated meditation. Some retreats lasted days.
These monks incorporated yamabushitake into their preparation practice, grinding it and drinking it as a tea. The effect they described is now something researchers have a name for: reduced neural inflammation, increased nerve growth factor expression, and improved working memory under conditions of mental fatigue.
They did not know any of that. They just knew it worked.
The Yamabushi observed that regular consumption helped sustain concentration across days of meditation. They had no way of naming what was happening. We now call it NGF stimulation.
Europe: a much later arrival
The mushroom grows wild across East Asia, North America, and Europe, but its medicinal applications did not register in the Western pharmacopoeia until significantly later. The first formal scientific classification was by the Swedish mycologist Elias Magnus Fries in 1836, who named it Hericium erinaceus, from the Latin for hedgehog, a nod to its spiny appearance. The Lion's Mane name followed in common English usage, again purely descriptive. In European folk traditions it surfaces occasionally, eaten in France and Germany where it grows on old beech trees, but treated as an interesting woodland edible rather than a functional agent. The medicinal tradition lived entirely in East Asia for roughly a thousand years before Western science caught up.
The twentieth century: from folk tonic to research subject
The first serious scientific investigations began in Japan in the 1990s. Researchers at Tohoku University identified two novel classes of compounds found nowhere else in nature: hericenones (in the fruiting body) and erinacines (in the mycelium). Both stimulate the production of Nerve Growth Factor, or NGF, a protein critical for the growth, maintenance, and survival of neurons.
What made this remarkable is that hericenones and erinacines are small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, meaning they can stimulate NGF production directly in the brain. A landmark 2009 clinical trial by Mori and colleagues gave 30 adults aged 50 to 80 with mild cognitive impairment either Lion's Mane extract or a placebo for 16 weeks. The Lion's Mane group showed statistically significant improvements on cognitive function scales. When the supplement was withdrawn, scores declined again over four weeks.
The monks had been right all along. They just did not have the vocabulary.
Where it sits today
Lion's Mane has spent the last decade being adopted by the biohacking community. Stack it, dose it, measure outputs. There is nothing wrong with this, but it occasionally produces a clinical detachment from something deeply embedded, for a very long time, in practices of attention, ritual, and daily care.
The monks were not optimising. They were tending to their minds the way you tend a garden, with patience, consistency, and the understanding that results do not come instantly. They built it into a ritual: something done at the same time each day, in the same way, with the same intention.
The tradition the Yamabushi understood, building focus supporting habits into a daily ritual, is as relevant now as it was in 12th century mountain Japan.
Want to go deeper?
The history is fascinating. The biology is more so. Read: What actually happens in your brain on Lion's Mane, where we cover NGF, BDNF, and what neuroplasticity means day to day.
Or try it: our Lion's Mane Oat Latte uses whole fruiting body extract in an oat base formulated for absorption. No jitters. No crash.
Author: Eleazar Minchev, Co-Founder of Mindfuel Flow.
Sources: Mori K et al. (2009). Phytotherapy Research; Li Shizhen (c.1578). Bencao Gangmu, Ming Dynasty.
