Qi


In the Sinosphere and Chinese philosophy, qi is a vital force traditionally believed to be a part of all living entities. Literally meaning 'vapor', 'air', 'gas', or 'breath', the word qi is polysemous, often translated as 'vital energy', 'vital force', 'material energy', or simply 'energy'. Qi is also a concept in traditional Chinese medicine and in Chinese martial arts. The attempt to cultivate and balance qi is called qigong.
Believers in qi describe it as a vital force, with one's good health requiring its flow to be unimpeded. Originally prescientific, today it is a pseudoscientific concept, i.e. not corresponding to the concept of energy as used in the physical sciences.
Chinese gods and immortals, especially anthropomorphic gods, are sometimes thought to have qi and be a reflection of the microcosm of qi in humans, both having qi that can concentrate in certain body parts.

Linguistic aspects

The cultural keyword qì is analyzable in terms of Chinese and Sino-Xenic pronunciations. It is represented by the logographs 氣, 气, and 気 with various meanings ranging from "vapor" to "anger", and is the source of the English loanword qi or ch'i.

Pronunciation and etymology

The logograph 氣 is read with two Chinese pronunciations: the usual qì 氣 "air; vital energy" and the rare archaic xì 氣 "to present food". Hackett Publishing Company, Philip J. Ivanhoe, and Bryan W. Van Norden theorize that the word qi possibly came from a term that referred to "the mist that arose from heated sacrificial offerings".
Pronunciations of 氣 in modern varieties of Chinese with standardized IPA equivalents include: Standard Chinese qì, Wu Chinese qi, Southern Min khì, Eastern Min ké, Standard Cantonese hei3, and Hakka Chinese hi.
Pronunciations of 氣 in Sino-Xenic borrowings include: Japanese ki, Korean gi, and Vietnamese khí.
Reconstructions of the Middle Chinese pronunciation of 氣 standardized to IPA transcription include: /kʰe̯iH/, /kʰĭəiH/, /kʰiəiH/, /kʰɨjH/, and /kʰɨiH/.
Axel Schuessler's reconstruction of the Later Han Chinese pronunciation of 氣 is /kɨs/.
Reconstructions of the Old Chinese pronunciation of 氣 standardized to IPA transcription include: */kʰɯds/, */C.qʰəp-s/, and */kəs/.
The etymology of qì interconnects with Kharia kʰis "anger", Sora kissa "move with great effort", Khmer kʰɛs "strive after; endeavor", and Gyalrongic kʰɐs "anger".

Characters

In the East Asian languages, qì has three logographs:
In addition, qì is an uncommon character especially used in writing Daoist talismans. Historically, the word qì was generally written as 气 until the Han dynasty, when it was replaced by the 氣 graph clarified with mǐ "rice" indicating "steam " and depicting the Traditional Chinese view of the transformative, changeable nature of existence and the universe.
This primary logograph 气, the earliest written character for qì, consisted of three wavy horizontal lines seen in Shang dynasty oracle bone script, Zhou dynasty bronzeware script and large seal script, and Qin dynasty small seal script. These oracle, bronze, and seal scripts logographs 气 were used in ancient times as a phonetic loan character to write qǐ 乞 "plead for; beg; ask" which did not have an early character.
The vast majority of Chinese characters are classified as radical-phonetic characters. Such characters combine a semantically suggestive "radical characters" with a phonetic element approximating ancient pronunciation. For example, the widely known word dào "the Dao; the way" graphically combines the "walk" radical 辶 with a shǒu 首 "head" phonetic. Although the modern dào and shǒu pronunciations are dissimilar, the Old Chinese *lˤuʔ-s 道 and *l̥uʔ-s 首 were alike. The regular script character qì is unusual because qì is both the "air radical" and the phonetic, with mǐ 米 "rice" semantically indicating "steam; vapor".
This qì 气 "air/gas radical" was only used in a few native Chinese characters like yīnyūn 氤氲 "thick mist/smoke", but was also used to create new scientific characters for gaseous chemical elements. Some examples are based on pronunciations in European languages: fú 氟 "fluorine" and nǎi 氖 "neon". Others are based on semantics: qīng 氫 "hydrogen " and lǜ 氯 " chlorine".
Qì 氣 is the phonetic element in a few characters such as kài 愾 "hate" with the "heart-mind radical" 忄or 心, xì 熂 "set fire to weeds" with the "fire radical" 火, and xì 餼 "to present food" with the "food radical" 食.
The first Chinese dictionary of characters, the Shuowen Jiezi notes that the primary qì'' 气 is a pictographic character depicting 雲气 "cloudy vapors", and that the full 氣 combines 米 "rice" with the phonetic qi 气, meaning 饋客芻米 "present provisions to guests".

Meanings

Qi is a polysemous word. The unabridged Chinese-Chinese character dictionary Hanyu Da Cidian defines it as "present food or provisions" for the xì pronunciation but also lists 23 meanings for the qì pronunciation. The modern ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, which enters xì 餼 "grain; animal feed; make a present of food", and a qì 氣 entry with seven translation equivalents for the noun, two for bound morphemes, and three equivalents for the verb.
n. ① air; gas ② smell ③ spirit; vigor; morale ④ vital/material energy ⑤ tone; atmosphere; attitude ⑥ anger ⑦ breath; respiration b.f. ① weather 天氣 tiānqì ② aspiration 送氣 sòngqì v. ① anger ② get angry ③ bully; insult.
Qi was also thought of as meaning "'forces in nature'" that deity could control and magicians and occultists could harness.

English borrowing

Qi was an early Chinese loanword in English. It was romanized as k'i in Church Romanization in the early-19th century, as ch'i in Wade–Giles in the mid-19th century, and as qi in Pinyin in the mid-20th century. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for qi gives the pronunciation as, the etymology from Chinese qì "air; breath", and a definition of "The physical life-force postulated by certain Chinese philosophers; the material principle." It also gives eight usage examples, with the first recorded example of k'í in 1850, of ch'i in 1917, and qi in 1971
The word qi is very frequently used in word games—such as Scrabble—due to containing a letter Q without a letter U.

Concept

References to concepts analogous to qi are found in many Asian belief systems. Philosophical conceptions of qi from the earliest records of Chinese philosophy correspond to Western notions of humours and to the ancient Hindu yogic concept of prana. An early form of qi comes from the writings of the Chinese philosopher Mencius.
The ancient Chinese described qi as "life force". They believed it permeated everything and linked their surroundings together. Qi was also linked to the flow of energy around and through the body, forming a cohesive functioning unit. By understanding the rhythm and flow of qi, they believed they could guide exercises and treatments to provide stability and longevity.
Although the concept has been important within many Chinese philosophies, over the centuries the descriptions of qi have varied and have sometimes been in conflict. Until China came into contact with Western scientific and philosophical ideas, the Chinese had not categorized all things in terms of matter and energy. Qi and li were 'fundamental' categories similar to matter and energy.
"In later Chinese philosophy, qi was thought of as the fundamental 'stuff' out of which everything in the universe condenses and into which it eventually dissipates."
Fairly early on, some Chinese thinkers began to believe that there were different fractions of qi—the coarsest and heaviest fractions formed solids, lighter fractions formed liquids, and the most ethereal fractions were the "lifebreath" that animated living beings. Yuanqi is a notion of innate or prenatal qi which is distinguished from acquired qi that a person may develop over their lifetime.

Philosophical roots

The earliest texts that speak of qi give some indications of how the concept developed. In the Analects of Confucius, qi could mean "breath". Combining it with the Chinese word for blood, the concept could be used to account for motivational characteristics:
The philosopher Mozi used the word qi to refer to noxious vapors that would eventually arise from a corpse were it not buried at a sufficient depth. He reported that early civilized humans learned how to live in houses to protect their qi from the moisture that troubled them when they lived in caves. He also associated maintaining one's qi with providing oneself with adequate nutrition. In regard to another kind of qi, he recorded how some people performed a kind of prognostication by observing qi in the sky.
Mencius described a kind of qi that might be characterized as an individual's vital energies. This qi was necessary to activity and it could be controlled by a well-integrated willpower. When properly nurtured, this qi was said to be capable of extending beyond the human body to reach throughout the universe. It could also be augmented by means of careful exercise of one's moral capacities. On the other hand, the qi of an individual could be degraded by adverse external forces that succeed in operating on that individual.
Living things were not the only things believed to have qi. Zhuangzi indicated that wind is the qi of the Earth. Moreover, cosmic yin and yang "are the greatest of qi. He described qi as "issuing forth" and creating profound effects. He also said "Human beings are born the accumulation of qi. When it accumulates there is life. When it dissipates there is death... There is one qi that connects and pervades everything in the world."
The Guanzi essay Neiye is the oldest received writing on the subject of the cultivation of vapor and meditation techniques. The essay was probably composed at the Jixia Academy in Qi in the late fourth century B.C.
Xun Zi, another Confucian scholar of the Jixia Academy, followed in later years. At 9:69/127, Xun Zi says, "Fire and water have qi but do not have life. Grasses and trees have life but do not have perceptivity. Fowl and beasts have perceptivity but do not have yi. Men have qi, life, perceptivity, and yi." Chinese people at such an early time had no concept of radiant energy, but they were aware that one can be heated by a campfire from a distance away from the fire. They accounted for this phenomenon by claiming "qi" radiated from fire. At 18:62/122, he also uses "qi" to refer to the vital forces of the body that decline with advanced age.
Among the animals, the gibbon and the crane were considered experts at inhaling the qi. The Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu wrote in Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals: "The gibbon resembles a macaque, but he is larger, and his color is black. His forearms being long, he lives eight hundred years, because he is expert in controlling his breathing."
Later, the syncretic text assembled under the direction of Liu An, the Huai Nan Zi, or "Masters of Huainan", has a passage that presages most of what is given greater detail by the Neo-Confucians:
Qi is linked to East Asian thought on magic, and certain body parts were important to magic traditions such as some Taoist sects.