What is Qi? Part Three

By Ken Rose

Excerpt from: Qi The Journal of Traditional Eastern Health & Fitness Volume 17, No.2, Summer 2007

Communication

     It is not enough to notice that we are interconnected with all things, all spaces, all times, all other people, spirits, animals, plants, and inanimate objects in the whole universe. Perhaps this sounds like a grandiose overstatement, but it is the essential truth, and as I suggest, it is not enough even to notice and remark on this remarkable connectivity: qi.

     We must also point out that through this inter-connectivity we communicate...at least we have the potential to communicate with everything that is. Just as in the English word "universe" whose roots mean "one turn" or "turning to one", the Chinese word qi implies that all things seek to express their common origin and destiny with all other things.

     Moreover, all things must engage in this communication of their common urges in order for living systems to exist and survive. In the human body, the lungs and the heart must intercommunicate or they die...along with the whole body and the person, of course. The same is true naturally for all the other primary internal organs, the liver, the kidney, the spleen and stomach, etc. And the intercommunication of fluids and functions of all these organs is described in terms of their coursing qi in Chinese medical terms.

     This pattern of observation and description of the structures and operations of the body and mind is refined further in the texts and teachings of qi gong. And qi is the primary concern here as well. What is the proper use of the body? The mind commands, the muscles and bones obey. How do we move the body therefore in qi gong? The mind moves the qi, the qi moves the body. And this communication of body, mind and qi is governed by and results in the vitality of the spirit.

Change

The most basic notion in ancient Chinese thought is change. The oldest of the old Chinese books is the Book of Changes. The book of changes records the blueprint for a universe constructed on these few principles:

Everything always changes, and change is therefore the only universal constant. This change manifests in and from a fundamental pattern of vibration, back and forth, between yin and yang, the two primordial powers. The word that describes this basic pattern of change is qi.

Qi is change. It is the subject and predicate in ancient Chinese sentence that tells us that the world in which we live is the never-ending dance of yin and yang. This wonderful sentence contains just one word. Qi.

Movement

     Scientists in the West examining the nature of the universe began to calculate the pressure and temperature of gasses some 300 years ago. They came to recognize, among a wide array of other properties, that one of the primary characteristics of the physical universe is that nothing ever stops moving. To do so would result in that thing, whatever it might be, having a temperature of absolute zero. Apparently no place in the physical universe has this temperature. Mathematicians speculate about and even calculate tempratures below absolute zero. But no one comes to this point experimentally so far, although a few physicists have come close.

     In our meditations we can do even better, and as in the meditative practice of Yiquan, we seek and even achieve stillness in movement. How? It is all a matter of qi. For what is moving that keeps any and everything in the world and in the universe in which the world exists about absolute zero? It is qi. Physicists speak of Brownian movement as the result of instantaneous imbalance of forces in underlying molecular structures. The ancient Chinese classic of astronomy (in which we find the earliest recorded Chinese discussions of cosmology) mentions that the universe comes into existence when the void begins to vibrate. This most fundamental movement is conserved until the present and is known by just one word: qi.

What is Qi?

     So what is qi?
     Qi is that which...it is the fact that...all things, events, phenomena interconnect, intercommunicate, interchange and move. It is the medium of change from the most fundamental, proto-typical aspects of the universe to the whole throbbing mass of universal emptiness. That the world is constructed from the ceaseless dance of yin and yang is described in this single Chinese word: qi.

     Where there is qi there is life. Where the qi does not penetrate, life ceases. How do we come to know these things? Only through direct personal experience. Perhaps beyond the great importance of knowing what qi is lies an even more essential question: what do you do with qi? In fact, the discovery and understanding of qi opens up a whole world of exploration and investigation. This is the path of self-cultivation that has been followed for thousands of years. Perhaps reading these few words about qi, you can decide whether or not it is a suitable path for you.

     But why dos it matter that we know what qi is? For the practitioner of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, herbal medicine, massage, etc. done according to ancient Chinese models and theories, the proper understanding of qi is central. If we think of qi as energy, for example, then when a patient has the signs of qi deficiency, we should fill him or her up with energy. But what does that mean? Practically speaking ,there is little anyone can do to accomplish this. But if we look at the same individual as having a lack or absence of connectivity, suffering from disrupted communications, obstructed changes, and inhibited movement, then the door to effective intervention opens widely.

     Need more qi? Find the disconnted parts that need and want to be connected and reconnect them. Discover what one part of the body needs to communicate with the others and do what you can to facilitate the exchange. See What needs to change, find what has ceased to change and restore its capacity to change. Feel the restricted movement and move it. The qi will flourish.

You will be on your way.

What is Qi? - Part Two

By Ken Rose

Excerpt from: Qi The Journal of Traditional Eastern Health & Fitness Volume 17, No.2, Summer 2007

Connectivity

     The implications of this one remark are considerable. For if old Zhuang Zi was right, if one qi permeates the entire universe, then everything in the universe is interconnected by this single qi. In other words, a single unifying qi connects everything that is or was or will be. It is in recognition of the primacy of this character of qi that I have chosen the English word connectivity as the first equivalent for qi. That there is a connection between any and all objects, artifacts, phenomena, and interactions between them in the whole universe is expressed in the ancient Chinese word qi.

     When we speak of points lying along channel pathways on the surface of the body that bear names and associates with internal organ systems, we exemplify this connective potential of qi. The points, the channels, the organs are all interconnected by qi. If the large intestine is sluggish, for example, we can stimulate its activity by stimulating a point on the hand that lies on the associated channel pathway.

     This kind of physiological relationship can be described in many ways. The Chinese selected this word qi to serve as the descriptor of all such phenomena and functions, within the body as well as without. This selection reveals an underlying sense of the way the word is. Everything is interconnected, and thus the proper study of the human mind is the discovery and mapping of the interconnections as well as the patterns and meta-patterns of these interconnections.

     Thus we get the often seen yet little understood charts of the body that depict the depots and stations, the mountains and valleys, the markets and the meeting places to and through and about which the qi courses it particular travels through the body each day as it busies itself with its cosmic task of connecting each and every place in the body to each and every other place.

     Quite simply, the fundamental treatment strategy in Chinese medicine could be described as discovering where the body's patterns of interconnection have been disrupted and acting (as through acupuncture, massage, medicinal herbs or other means) to reestablish normative connections and patterns of connectivity. This connectivity begins and ends with breathing.

     Before proceeding to a brief discussion of the other three English words chosen to round out the meaning of qi, namely, communication, change, and movement, I want to make note of the importance of this very common definition of qi that pertains to gaining a full comprehension of what qi is. In Chinese qi means many things, among them, air and breath. The atmosphere is known simply as the big qi.

     Therefore qi is all about breathing and the breath that, while passing in and out of our lungs, connects us with the great qi in which we exist. One of the most potent curative aspects of qi gong, that catchall phrase used to describe a wide variety of breathing and yogic/meditative practices intended to develop, accumulate and cultivate an individuals qi, is simply the concentration and strengthening of the capacity for breathing. The breath of life: qi. And when you can no longer draw it in or let it pass without, life has ceased to be in that small sector of the universe known as your body.

     Breath, then, might be considered as the first and last definition of qi, except for the fact that this one English word, "breath", tells us rather little about the other implications and innuendos that have become associated with this word over the millennia since it was first coined and used in ancient China. To get at this fuller understanding of what we mean when we say, for example, sink your qi to your dan tian, as we often say in the study and practice of qi gong and other related arts (not the least of which certainly is the art of medicine), we have to turn to additional English words. Turning from page to page in the dictionary, we find these three words that taken together and summed up with connectivity all serve to construct an aggregate of sense that comes close to the ancient essence of the word, qi.

What is Qi? - Part One

By Ken Rose

Excerpt from: Qi The Journal of Traditional Eastern Health & Fitness Volume 17, No.2, Summer 2007


     In Qi gong and Chinese Medicine there is no more fundamental question than, what is qi? Virtually all of the theories and methodologies employed in the course of Chinese medical interventions, from acupuncture to herbal medicine to massage and qigong, focus on manipulating and influencing an individual's qi. In qi gong we practice accumulating qi and refining qi. So what is it? The question is an obvious and important one, but straightforward answers are seldom easy to come by. This brief description is intended to be a start, a finger pointing a direction for the exploring mind to travel. The meaningful answers come to those who actually make the journey. And as with the mythic journey of Ulysses, when we set out on a voyage to discover the meaning of qi, we should pray that our journey be a long one.

     Qi has been frequently translated into English as "energy." But this is a poor choice to be nominated as an equivalent for qi. For one thing, the meanings of energy in English are too varied and often vague to serve as a translation for the similarly varied and value meanings of the usages of qi in Chinese. This fact might at first seem to recommend the equivalence of qi and energy, but in practice the juxtaposition of so many vague and varied meanings on both sides of the translational divide results in sheer confusion. When some one says that qi is energy, what does that mean? One vague and poorly defined word is the same as another? But what do they mean? Discussions concerning qi often bog down in just this kind of quagmire, and this is largely owning to the reliance upon energy as an equivalent term for qi.

     Rather than dwell on this aspect of the situation with respect to understanding what qi is, we should advance towards as clear a statement as possible of what qi does, in fact mean. If it doesn't mean energy, what does it mean?

The Meaning and Usage of Qi

     In a book entitled A Brief History of Qi, I tried to sum up some 3,000 years of this word's documented history. Its use as a key term in Chinese thinking probably extends many more millennia into China's shadowy periods of pre-history. This brief essay is a beginning of a follow up volume to that one. Here I will present four English words that, taken together, do a fair job of conveying the gist of the ancient Chinese sensibility about the world that is wrapped up in the word qi.

     The core meanings of qi can be conveyed by these four English words: connectivity, communication, change, and movement. Note that each of these is an abstract noun, i.e., the name of something that does not exist except as a property of concrete things. This suggests that qi is not primarily a concrete thing but an abstract quality of concrete things. And this is largely accurate as an overall description of qi, as it is often used in Chinese language and literature. Whatever qi is, whatever those who coined and who have used the word have meant to say with it for the past several thousand years, it is accurate to say that there is widespread consensus that it is not an essential material, concrete thing but is rather a property or aspect or consequence of behavior dynamics of material, concrete things.

     Qi is therefore essentially a philosophical term, although its origins certainly predate the emergence of any recognizable body of philosophical thought. But it emerges from the same roots as does philosophy in China's past, namely the observation and consideration of natural phenomena. Put in its own philosophical context, qi is a consequence of the ever-changing dance of yin and yang. Qi is another way of saying that the world is constructed of yin and yang. In the most ancient of the ancient Chinese books, the Book of Changes, it is written that one yin and one yang result in the Dao, where Dao is understood as the overarching and all-embracing flux of the natural world.

     Ancient Chinese philosophers and proto-philosophers yearned to find a way to express a deep sense of connection that they felt with the world in which they lived. They peered deeply into the processes of nature and of their own minds in examining their natural surroundings, and they formulated eloquent statements concerning subtle aspects of the interface between mankind and the natural world.

     They coined the words yin and yang to describe the phenomena associated with the appearance of light and shadow in the world and to suggest the implications and paradoxes with which these phenomena appear to present us. They used this word Dao, which literally means pathway or road, to serve as a kind of catchall term to signify the awareness and recognition that all things share a common origin, which is why paradoxically enough that they diverge in shape and name and position in time and space and thus appear as a multiplicity to our eyes and other senses.

     They coined and used these terms yin and yang, qi, and Dao to describe the design and operation of the system in which they understood themselves to be living and breathing components. And particularly in the school of thinking that came to be known as Daoism, they used these words to refine and clarify their understanding of this universal process (Dao) that provided both the field and the individual, specific points of focus in that field that serve as the matrix of life and meaning. In doing so they often pointed out that the overriding importance in observing and studying the phenomena and patterns of nature was to see and experience their interconnectedness.

     In other words, yin and yang, qi and Dao all share and ultimately refer to a single meaning. This is not to say that each term does not have its own special meaning and particular usages. Each certainly does. But each essentially means the same thing. The only universal constant is change, and change takes place as a result of and through the most fundamental medium of yin and yang. The force and fact of this pattern is qi. The sum total of the activities of qi is called Dao. The manifest oneness of these is a compelling feature of the whole approach to knowledge that we know as Chinese native philosophy, especially Daoism.

     Yet there is another aspect of qi that is even more compelling. The word began its long life as a pictographic representation of steam rising above a field. Its form altered over centuries to reflect the needs and the predilections of scribes and scholars who were busy with the work of creating one of the world's most curious and long lived systems of writing. Little is more challenging or more rewarding for those with a bent for words and language and literature than the study of the Chinese written language and its long history of literary traditions.

     From this tradition of scholars and intellectuals there emerged a set of sensibilities that placed a high value on cultivating the capacity to see the relationships between things and phenomena. This millennia-long initiative to study and sort existence in organic categories in order to facilitate understanding the interactive dynamics and potentials of living systems beings with a quest for cosmological comprehension. In other words, qi is a term that emerges from the ancient quest to understand the origins of the universe and it was made manifest over thousands of years in that part of the world and by those people we know now as China and the Chinese.

     In the terms of Chines folklore, the world comes from a giant egg that contained two things. One was a giant named Pan Gu, the other was a substance named "original qi." This "substance" is best described as yin and yang in an undifferentiated state of existence.

     Shown above in the illustration is an early version of the Taiji diagram, the chart of yin and yang. Imagine how it would appear if the black and the white were merged into a single graphic form and substance. The resuilt would be a drawing of original qi.

     One day the giant breaks the egg and the original qi leaks out. The clear, light aspect is thus freed to rise and form heaven, while the heavy, turbid characteristics descend and congeal to form the earth. The giant steps out onto the newly formed earth and where he steps, valleys are shaped beneath his feet. The mountains rise up with his every step. His sweat drips down and fills rivers and seas. Even humans have a point of origin in this old folk tale. We are the maggots that drop from Pan Gu's body as he traverses his new universe.

     From these humble folk beginnings thinkers and writers cultivated the concept of qi for countless centuries until the extraordinary period know as The Warring States, China was then a battlefield on which the armies of seven principal kingdoms fought internecine war for nearly five centuries. The great kingdom of the Zou court was in ruins, and philosophers pondered the path towards civil harmony, as the kings in whose employ they inevitably found themselves ensured that peace would never come.

     In this atmosphere of endless struggle and conflict, some of the world's most pacific philosophy emerged. The Daoists promulgated a strategy of non-action, and from this perspective one of the most famous Daoists of the Warring States Period, Zhuang Zi, contemplated qi. His conclusion: in all the world is there but one qi.