Qi and Spirit?
Greetings!
This is my first post, but I've been reading the forum for about six months now, and appreciating the quality of discussion in general.
I'll warn you that it's a long and slightly difficult post; but I hope it will be useful.
Judging by various posts and articles from all kinds of sources, I am not the only one confused about qi, and what exactly it is meant to mean.
In most martial arts uses of the word, it seems superfluous. That is, if someone says 'you form an intent, your intent moves your qi, and your qi moves your body' it seems to many that the qi part is unnecessary.
From our own experience, and indeed from modern biology, it seems sufficient to say 'your intent moves your body directly'.
I'm sure this is a familiar issue to you all, but I hope to bring something new (or rather, old) to the discussion. So please bear with me.
Firstly, many have pointed out that when qi was commonly accepted, there was a lack of modern biological understanding of the body. This implies that qi is simply an anachronistic concept. Yet nobody here wishes to believe that these ancient masters and gong fu men would waste their time on something that wasn't having an actual effect.
So some people try to find the biological equivalent of qi, suggesting that the concept of 'qi' was invented to explain the subjective experience of enhanced blood flow, increased oxygen, or some kind of neurological effect - perhaps relating to proprioception. In other words, they try to reduce qi to a modern biological level.
This reductionist approach has been used in the west for a long time. It is a powerful approach because it forces us to get rid of unnecessary concepts and theories. But is 'qi' simply a case of ancient people trying to 'fill in the blanks' in their knowledge of biology?
To try to answer this question, I decided to look at the western equivalent of qi, and to see how this concept was interpreted by western philosophy prior to the rise of biological reductionism.
The Western equivalent of qi is, I believe, 'spirit'.
There are two points in favour of this link: firstly, both qi and spirit have an original meaning of air or breath, yet both refer now to something more abstract and mysterious:
http://afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/zhendic...q=%AE%F0&as=b5
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spirit
Secondly, spirit has suffered in the same way as qi from the reductionism of modern science.
This does not mean that 'qi' and 'spirit' always mean exactly the same thing, but it suggests that they play a similar role in Chinese and Western culture.
You might disagree that qi and spirit have any kind of equivalence, but nevertheless, I think we can profit from understanding what has happened to 'spirit' in a western context.
If we imagine living in a world without scientific reductionism, where we have a fresh view of all the objects around us, there is no immediate reason to try to break things down to their component parts or
basic elements. (reductionism is exactly the kind of view that says 'water is really just hydrogen and oxygen combined' for example).
But it would occur to us pretty quickly that there is a difference between living and non-living things.
Without thinking about oxygen, the respiratory system, and all of that; we would notice that the main difference between living and non-living things, is breath. 'Spiritus' 'Pneuma' and 'Ruah' are respectively the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words for breath.
Now, for us as modern people, we view breath simply as a biological process for obtaining oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. For us, breath is not mysterious. But if you could forget your biological knowledge for a moment, you would see that breath is very mysterious. For a pre-modern man, breath would seem to be the most obvious sign of life. In other words, when this human thing is alive, it
contracts and expands almost constantly. When it ceases this, it dies.
But pre-modern humans were not stupid. If I hold my breath, I do not die (though I will have to breathe again soon). Also, I may be killed by methods that do not directly extinguish my breath.
Clearly, breath was the effect of something else, something that gave us life. 'Breath' therefore became synonymous with the mysterious cause of life within us....the thing that seemed to disappear when we died....the animating principle.
In a western context, when people talk about 'spirit' they are clearly not talking about breath. Yet breath is the closest thing to the animating principle that we can observe, hence the Latin, Greek and Hebrew terms, as well as (arguably) the Chinese and Indian terms (prana), all evolve from air or breath to mean something more subtle.
This is the first and most basic level of understanding what spirit is. From this point of view, spirit is the life-giving or animating principle in a human being.
If we stick with that point for now, we can see the possibility that the Chinese developed the concept of qi along the same lines as the western spirit.
In other words, qi is the 'animating principle' in a human being.
What does this mean?
It means that qi refers in a 'holistic' sense to whatever it is in a human being that makes them alive and animate. The fact that we move, breathe, eat, and sleep, is all due to this animating principle.
Qi Gong is therefore literally the skill derived from working with this animating principle.
The exercises that constitute qi gong can therefore be expected to make us more 'alive'.
This concept of qi is not reducible to biological systems, because qi refers to the complete workings of those systems!
Biology comes from the greek 'Bios' - 'life' and 'logia' - 'study of'. Biology studies the effects or the components of qi/spirit/pneuma/ the animating principle.
Modern science attempts to reduce everything to its component parts, but this can be a hindrance when we look at something like qi gong and try to understand which particular biological system is being enhanced. The answer must be 'all of them', or at least, that is the intent behind it.
From this point of view, a person with more qi or more spirit should literally be 'more alive' than someone with less qi or spirit. This is not a cause and effect relationship, like having more iron in one's diet causes one to be more healthy in certain respects.....rather, it is a descriptive definition: more qi actually means more alive.
Now, in case it seems that I've taken the mystery out of it, be aware how prone we are to reducing life to its component parts. Ask yourself - is a human life only the sum of its biological systems? or is it more than the sum of these parts? And could the ancient masters have discerned exercises to make us more alive, quite distinct from every modern method such as 'ordinary' exercise and a good diet?
I have reason to believe that we are more than the sum of our biological parts, and in this context, qi or spirit really is more than just a primitive biology.
I'll leave it here for now, but there are still important questions and problems that need to be addressed, including: why the concept of qi is sometimes extended to include inanimate objects, and whether this can be reconciled with the concept of qi in human beings.
Also, I haven't taken the conflict between reductionism and qi/spirit to its ultimate conclusion. But I can address these in a subsequent post if anyone is interested.
But I'll finish by returning to the original issue: ' your intent moves your qi, and your qi moves your body' - does this make any more sense now? According to what I have discussed above, qi is not something that will ever be discovered in between the motor cortex and the muscles of your body. Rather, as the animating principle, it is responsible for all aspects of your being alive.
The statement above about qi (which I paraphrased roughly from other sources) suggests that the level of our qi can be much more profound and highly cultivated, such that it moves with our intent. In other words, we move with our whole 'aliveness', and hence the entirety of our biological systems are coordinated also.
We are accustomed to thinking about the difference between someone throwing a punch that is disconnected from their body, versus someone whose punch is connected to their whole body. Well, if we applied the concept of qi to that dichotomy, we would say that the 'connected' person is combining their intent with their qi much more effectively. It's like the difference between a half-hearted punch and one that has your whole 'life' or being behind it.
According to this view, when someone talks about feeling the qi, or moving the qi, they are really talking about the effects of qi - which means the effects of being more 'alive'.
This allows us to resolve to some degree the reductionist dilemma. Eg. when someone says 'the qi sinks into the bones' and then explains that as 'if you practice with proper connection and alignment, your bones will slowly become stronger' then we may be tempted to think 'ah, so qi just means having proper connection and alignment', then discard 'qi' as a redundant concept.
But in fact, 'qi' encapsulates all the changes that we will notice when we are more 'alive'; and this is something for which we do not know the real limits. Perhaps when we are more 'alive' we heal much faster, perceive things more accurately, have much greater strength and speed, and better coordination between our minds and bodies? Perhaps we feel more alive too, to the extent that we could say 'yeah, i feel qi when i practice'?
Thanks for reading.
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Originally Posted by ZouMaKanHua
