Qi: The Nameless Breath of the World

Our languages have no true equivalent for the word qi. When we say "energy," we say something, and we hide a great deal more. Qi is not matter, not spirit, not a force that can be poured into a vessel and measured. This essay is an attempt to come close to what the ancient Chinese texts called qi, from its earliest trace in the wind to its last appearance in the mist and dew of the body.

1. Before Qi, There Was Wind

In the oldest Chinese inscriptions, dating from the fourteenth to the twelfth century BCE, there is no sign for qi. What we find is the sign for wind. In that world, wind was the messenger of heaven: it came from above, reached the earth, and provoked a response. The character for wind holds an insect at its heart, because it was the wind that woke the worm, set the chrysalis moving, and brought the grain to sprout and ripen. The same character was close to the one for the phoenix, the bird that served the Supreme Being as keeper of the four winds and the four directions.

So the first vision of qi was this: something descends from above and awakens life in the earth.

The character for qi itself appeared later. Its oldest form is vapour rising from below, and its original meaning was prayer, or petition. The fuller form holds a grain of rice at its centre: steam from cooking grain, slowly lifting the lid of the pot. This small image contains everything: warmth, strength, movement, and the transformation of food into something that sustains life.

2. Neither Substance Nor Spirit

The central statement of the book is this: qi is neither a substance nor a spirit.

Qi appears in every phenomenon and cannot be separated from its appearing. It gives each thing its character and its movement, yet it is not identical with the thing. It is both "everything" and "this one"; both the whole and the particular.

When something passes away, qi does not die. It only loses form and ceases to be seen. We may call this a kind of boundless potentiality, with one difference: this "potentiality" is not an abstraction. It is real. For this reason even "my qi" is not entirely mine. It is mine because it is, right now, my life. If my life ends one day, qi and the spirits do not vanish; they become something else, somewhere else, and carry on in the endless movement of life.

This view, which the Indian traditions approach from another angle, does not separate the wave from the ocean. The wave is the ocean, having taken, here and now, a particular shape.

3. Yin and Yang: Two Expressions of One Qi

The book reminds us that yin and yang were at first only shade and sunlight, the names of cold and heat, and just two of the six qi of heaven. Later the same qi came to be understood in two states: contraction and expansion. We cannot speak of qi without yin and yang, nor of yin and yang without qi.

Yang is vapour, rising, spreading, warmth. Yin is condensation, settling, cold. They are not two qi but two expressions of one. The Suwen, one of the foundational texts of Chinese medicine, says that cold at its extreme gives birth to heat, and heat at its extreme gives birth to cold. Life turns between these two and never goes so far that return becomes impossible, for that would be death. The same text uses the image of cloud and rain: clear, yang qi rises and becomes cloud; turbid, yin qi descends and becomes rain. This is the body itself. What rises clarifies the head and the senses; what descends returns to the earth.

Rochat de la Vallée says water is the best example of qi, because it changes form: water, steam, ice, and still the same water.

4. The Great Affliction: Stagnation

In the ancient texts, the central problem of qi is not "wickedness." It is blockage. Qi must flow like water, and water that stops, spoils.

In one account from the Zuozhuan, the wise ruler arranges his life around the four moments of the day: in the morning he sits to hear his people, during the day he gathers information, in the evening he writes his orders, and at night he rests. The result, the text says, is that he "regulates the diffusion of his qi and does not let it stagnate." In this way he remains free of "exhaustion of the body, clouding of the heart, and confusion of thought." For the same reason the pulse is taken at dawn: at that hour qi has not yet been stirred by the day.

This thought on rhythm is carried in the word jie (节), the knots of the bamboo. Rhythm means the right interval between knots: neither compressed, nor broken.

5. Will, Qi, and the Unshaken Heart

Mencius, the Confucian philosopher, describes the relation of qi and will this way: the will is the commander of qi, and qi is what fills the body. But the relation does not run in one direction only. When the will grips, it sets qi in motion; and when qi is blocked, it moves the will. He speaks of a heart that cannot be shaken, and of something he calls "flood-like qi" (hao ran zhi qi), an immense and unyielding force which, if nourished with integrity and not obstructed, fills the space between heaven and earth.

The word hao carries the root of water: pervasive, flowing. The word ran carries the root of fire: natural, without artifice. Flood-like qi is a sea at ease. And the point Rochat de la Vallée draws out is that when such qi is cultivated, the qi within and the qi without become one, the beginning of a kind of cosmic awareness.

Mencius also warns: if you cannot say something clearly, further thinking will not make it clear. The blockage is in the qi, not in the mind.

A faint echo of this can be heard in the Gita: action without clinging to its fruit, and a steadiness that comes out of a quiet heart. Qi does not answer the one who strives but cannot hear the rhythm.

6. Qi Comes Before Form

One of the striking points of the book is that qi always comes before form. In an ancient story, two snakes fight at the gate of a city, and the ruler asks what it means. The answer: when people are afraid, their qi blazes up like a flame, and such things appear. Apparitions have their source in human beings themselves.

Put simply: we do not only receive qi, we send it, through breath, through mood, through what we carry in the heart. And the qi we send takes shape.

In the Huainanzi we read that the body is the dwelling of life, qi is its fullness of strength, and the spirit (shen) is its guide. If one of the three loses its place, all three suffer. The madman has all three, but uses them in the wrong place.

7. The Empty Hollows

The oldest and most beautiful image in this book comes from Zhuangzi: the earth breathes, and its breath is called wind. When the wind blows, ten thousand hollows cry out; and when it passes, they are all empty again.

Rochat de la Vallée points out that the word for "hollow" (qiao, xue) is the same word used in acupuncture for points. Our bodies, too, are made of this perforated earth: open to qi.

And here is the story: the tree keeps nothing after the storm. We, however, remain full of qi, of emotion, of worry, even after the wind has passed. Master Ziqi, in Zhuangzi, sits with his body like a withered tree and his mind like dead ashes, and says: "Now I have lost myself."

In the same book we read of Zhuangzi's wife dying, and of him sitting and drumming on a tub and singing. He had grieved, he says, but then looked back at the beginning: first there was no life, then no form, then not even qi. From the confusion, a change; then qi, then form, then life, and now death, "like the turning of the four seasons." Life is the gathering of qi, and death its dispersal.

This is the same qi, sometimes condensed and visible, sometimes hidden and potential. There are not two qi.

8. In the Body: Heaven in Me, Earth in Me

Chinese medicine reads the same qi in the body. When qi shows itself, we can read it from the form it takes, and this is what diagnosis means.

One of the central sentences of the book comes from the Lingshu: "Heaven in me is virtue; earth in me is qi." Before force there is direction; before movement, uprightness.

The book names several kinds of qi in the body. Here only the broad outlines:

• Source qi (yuan qi): the force said to move "between the kidneys," the root of an individual life. The character yuan carries the image of water springing from a rock. Rochat de la Vallée stresses that this place is not anatomical; it speaks of the centre of the trunk, and is tied to "mandate" (ming), what each of us is given to be.
• Ancestral qi (zong qi): gathered in the "sea of qi" in the middle of the chest; it gives rhythm to breath and heartbeat.
• Authentic qi (zhen qi): what we receive from heaven, both breath and our own natural order.
• Correct qi (zheng qi): every qi in its right place and time. Zheng means to stop within a limit.
• Perverse qi (xie qi): qi out of place; the "thief wind" that enters through our emptiness.
• Nourishing and defensive qi (ying and wei): two expressions of yin and yang within the body. The first builds, repairs, and maintains; the second guards and circulates. The defensive qi moves through the yang by day and returns to the yin by night to renew itself, like the sun.

And in the last image of the book, the Lingshu describes qi "like mist and dew." Mist is almost water; dew is almost qi.

9. Illness as Going Against the Flow

One of the astonishing definitions in the book concerns illness. In this view, illness is a movement that goes against the natural flow of life (ni). Qi that is out of place, or out of time, or excessive, is already illness.

And the text warns that the thief wind enters through our emptiness. If the interior is whole and flowing, sudden cold and unexpected wind can do little. "If your heart stays calm, you can keep your defence in balance."

The Suwen offers a vast image: when heaven is clear and calm, light is radiant. But if heaven's virtue is held back within itself, sun and moon lose their brightness, and robber winds pour in. None of it is exchanged. It is a statement about the world and about the heart alike.

10. Return to the Source

Perhaps the clearest lesson of the book is this: the source is always present. A river remains a river because of its source; cut the spring and there is no river. The water at the source may grow muddy along the way, but if it keeps flowing, it clears itself again. The challenge is to accept the density of the world, as we accept cold and heat, and to keep flowing toward the sea.

And when Rochat de la Vallée quotes Hegel, "freedom is recognized necessity," she says: this is very Daoist.

In the end, cultivating qi is neither the accumulation of force nor its manipulation. It is tuning, as one tunes an instrument. What matters is the act itself, not what we hope to get from it. When we learn to move with the movement of life, the heart grows quiet, qi flows, and what "I" thought I knew finds a place to set itself down: the same source that was there from the beginning.

For further reading: Elisabeth Rochat de la Vallée, A Study of Qi in Classical Texts, Monkey Press, 2006.