More detailed distinctions about the evolution of Qi theory

When I started studying inner cultivation from the Chinese perspective I relied on a combination of Qigong, martial arts and Daoist books without any epistemic root. I think most people start out this way, but in the long run if we are attentive we may find there are certain contradictions in practice that seem eternally unanswered. As a result of training with a number of high level Chinese masters as well as having been able to have deep conversations with several more, I’ve been able to ask many of the questions I personally held about the inner dynamics of energy theory and have also conducted significant research on my own part through reading books from a span of 2500 years on this very topic in classical Chinese with the guidance of my main teacher Master Hai Yang.

As a result of having resolved many of these questions for myself, my deepest wish is to contribute a sensible perspective on the inner structure of the concepts of inner cultivation from the perspective of those arts which are related to the cultivation of the three treasures.

I write various articles on this subject here and since it is a big subject there is much to say. Today we look at the transformation of the concept of Qi in inner cultivation and how we came to the particular understanding we hold today. This topic is too big for one article, so I will specifically look at it from the perspective of the impact of modern thought on Qigong and the martial arts from a Daoist perspective.

1: The old view of Qi:

Qi has many meanings in China which are not related to inner cultivation, but in the world of inner cultivation it traditionally broadly accorded to the theory of the Yijing.

The basic idea of Qi as viewed through the Yijing is that it serves as the agent which communicates between extremes of Yin and Yang. Essentially Qi is the represantion of phases of Yin and Yang as expressed in the change and transformation of matter over time.

Yin tends to collect and become still while Yang tends to scatter and move, Yin condenses toward the earth while Yang disipates into the sky. Everything is some phase of either the pure forms or mixtures of Yin and Yang.

2: Daoism before the Song Dynasty:

Qi in old Daoism included the concept of Yuan Qi, but more importantly it was commonly explained as something related to the breath. Old Daoist practices tended toward the cultivation of deep breathing and saliva swallowing practices and did not contain much alchemical language. Visualization practices were an evolution which were able to allow people to sense specific generation of Qi in various parts of their bodies, so from that time forward the dynamics of Qi began to be better studied, but at that time the language of meridian activity was still mainly a Chinese Medicine idea and not related to inner cultivaiton in a deep way (that doesn’t mean meridians were not activated, it means a different language was used).

3: Daoism after the Song Dynasty:

in very old golden elixir books the main emphasis is on Jing and Shen coming together to form an alchemical Qi which is expressed by the character 炁 Qi, not 气 Qi. These two characters have no relationship. Alchemical Qi was originally conceived as a product of the union of Jing and Shen which then travelled between extreme Yin and Yang poles of the body. This is defined in Daoism as 消息 Xiao Xi which means either waxing and waning or sending a message between two places.

4: Qi from the Ming to the late Qing:

although the concept of Qi became more subtle in Daoism it did not greatly change its character for the subsequent thousand years before Chinese modernity. Qi in Daoist meditation if not defined according to the previously mentioned standard was typically discussed as 气质 Qi Zhi, a characteristic of a body. This has negative implications in texts like Xing Ming Gui Zhi and is seen as something which should be burned away through the alchemical process.

5: Entering the twentieth century:

Chinese civilization underwent a tremendous intellectual boom between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century which saw the rise of a modern view of science including life sciences. The idea of Qi was hotly contested by some modernist intellectuals while other intellectuals attempted to create scientific justifactions for the it. This led to a great mixing of Chinese Medicine knowledge with the physical sciences and importantly resulted in the old view of Qi being largely replaced with a new one.

Three major events changed Chinese perspectives about how Qi was viewed in inner cultivation:

• Daoist modernism: thinkers like Jiang Weiqiao and Zhao Bichen attempted to define Qi dynamics through analysis of the nervous, circulatory, and pulmonary systems along with the metabolic process.

• Integration of Wu Gong and Dao Gong: thinkers like Sun Lutang attempted to systmetmatize a form of Daoist practice in martial arts.

• Development of Qigong as a somatically driven form of Qi development.

Let’s briefly address each:

1: modernism:

Daoist adjacent thinkers attempted to create a scientific paradigm to define the activity of the three treasures with a special emphasis on things which could be said to be true about Qi. This often related to human life processes which appear to have bivalent elements such as the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, gas exchange in blood, inhalation and exhalation, anabolism and catabolism etc... Many of these ideas are hidden within Chinese Medicine manuscripts, but are less well explained in Daoist writings, so the application of these processes to self cultivation was completely novel and represented a major intellectual shift with profound implications (be honest, I bet you didn’t know about this part of history before you started reading IS).

2: Wu Gong and Dao Gong:

there had been some minor interaction between martial arts and Daoism since the Ming Dynasty, but the writings on the subject are contained within only a couple tracts and those may have been added to over time. The formal induction of Dao Gong into Wu Gong came about around the 1920s and consisted of an intellectual movement driven by martial artists who also followed Daoism or Yi Guan Dao. The discussion at that time was still extremely limited and the theories of Qi were all over the place without any formal agreement about the precise definition of terms or even how practice was supposed to work. Forged documents were also very common at that time, so it is a difficult period to study. We do know that some martial artists such as Sun Xikun followed Daoist practitioners and added Daoist alchemical methods into their martial arts, but this was a minority perspective and still does not represent the majority of martial artists in China.

3: Qigong somatics: after 1956 Qigong became a national craze in China and the research of Qigong went far beyond the traditional literature of the three Chinese religions and Chinese Medicine. It is well established that modern Qigong thinkers also often borrowed from Western, Indian and Russian ideas such as somatics, magick, Yoga etc.. to formulate their ideas. Especially during the 1980s there was a strong movement in Qigong to incorporate a sophisticated perspective of energetic cultivation which borrowed from many genres.

The most important transformative feature of this approach was to view Qi as a somatically accessible material which could be modified through the use of the intention (a quick note, this period was also when people began to use the idea of energy to define Qi, it is not older than modern Qigong).

This might strike you as funny since it seems like many ancient Daoist arts such as breath retention and visualization also have similar somatic elements, but this is a result of a historicist view of the past in which present day assumptions are built into our account of things which came before.

The perspective of classical Daoist literature on the subject of Qi always falls into the following boxes:

• cultivation of spiritual traits associated with the Dao, the bodies of deities, or a pre-heaven source point, or supplanting regular nutrition with breath which is perceived as containing subtle and clean nourishing materials that can support the organs,

• return to primiordial unity.

This concept of return to primordial unity underlies the majority of Daoist practices related to what we might consider somatic elements of Qi cultivation. Practices like the five animal plays do not fall into this category and are also not based on a somatic model of cultivating Qi. When we consider practices which do cultivate felt Qi it is almost always related to using the Qi to return to a state of original oneness which is close to the Dao and not for the purposes of adjusting energy in the post-heaven cognitive environment. Qi can be manifested in the post-heaven, but this is as a result of practices which abut on the pre-heaven and the regular cognitive experience of cultivating Qi is not the primary concern of those practices except when Qi is phrased as the union of Jing and Shen, or in internal alchemy post Song dynasty as the union of the pre-heaven three treasures.

It is much more common in pre-heaven Daoism to see appeals to seven treasures including various fluids and organs than a specific appeal to the cultivation of Qi. This is because their understanding of the body was unique to Daoism and had not yet fully absorbed Chinese Medical thought and certainly did not absorb any modern ideas about somatic values.

Now let’s talk about implications:

It was noted recently in a comment that old martial arts manuscripts fail to mention important features about Qi cultivation such as how specific energy centers are aligned in practice. The reason for this is simply because those practices did not exist at that time in history. As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, many of us at the outset of our journeys are faced with the insurmountable task of making sense of the smorasbord of concepts in the English language literature on the subject. We may practic Yang style Taiji but we also read books about Daoism and Qigong, or any other arrangement of unrelated subjects. These subjects are all deep studies in and of themselves and are only meant to be mixed after a certain level of proficiency has already been gained in more than one area.

When we look at the twentieth century literature of martial arts and Qigong some things are very clear:

1: evolving knowledge:

the earliest works of modern martial arts literature are crudely worded and vague. Words like Qi are used without any explanation. Traditionally the transmitters of Chinese martial arts have a vested interest in promoting the authenticity of their lineage perspectives, thus make appeals to hidden information in the documents, but miraculous claims require miraculous evidence and simply practicing a certain way and claiming it to be traditional does not provide sufficient justifaction for such claims. In point of fact we can go to old documents such as the Nei Gong Jing and find out what people thought were correct Daoist practices in martial arts as far back as 400 years ago. The practices detailed tend to be consistent with popular Dao Yin practices during the late Ming and early Qing dynasty which are designed for health preservation and typically involve various forms of circulating the small orbit using breath, intention, visualization and saliva. They are predicated on a very specific late imperial meridian based view of inner energy and tend to be among the most poorly written inner cultivation documents of that period. Comparing them against sophisticated Daoist texts like the secret of the Golden Flower or Xing Ming Gui Zhi only shows how little the authors of those documents really understood and how much they wanted to copy Daoist alchemists, even though they knew nothing of the subject.

By the early twentieth century we can see an active discussion in the internal martial arts community about the correct role of inner cultivation in practice. More complex Daoist, philosophical, medical and even biological language is used to describe practice which often follows the model of the tendon changing classic. The most common perspective in the writings of this period show that practitioners believed the stages of inner training began with loosening the sinews, then over time transforming the inner body through specific application of martial arts postures. The idea that martial arts could be useed to achieve spiritual englightenment is sometimes mentioned, especially in relation to Boddhidharma, but no concrete method is given. Another view expressed by a small contingent such as Xue Dian of Hebei Xingyi fame is that martial artists had misunderstood that nature of inner cultivation and actually had not sustainable way of cultivating inner energy. Xue was one of the few martial artists to propose an orthodox Neidan method of inner practice for martial artists around that time.

As martial arts moved into the mid twentieth century and the rift occurred between different parts of the Chinese world there came to be a lively and somewhat disjointed discussion of inner cultivation in the martial arts.

In mainland China traditional martial arts practice remained largely centered in orthodox lineages which have been passed down in the regional locales where certain martial arts are famous. For instance Hebei style Xingyiquan lives in Tianjin, Hengshui and to a lesser extent in Shandong province while Xinyi Liu He still finds its main home in Henan province with satalites in different areas where it has spread. The same basic criteria is true of most martial arts in the mainland. Lineage views are influenced by the community of specific styles, for instance in Tianjin it is common to see a certain approach to practicing Xingyi and Bagua, while Hengshui, a city close to the original birthplace of Xingyi has a different perspective which arises out of the older variation of the style popular there.

This means that certain things like Dantian method vary radically place to place and there is often inter-lineage sharing in those areas leading to a basic general understanding among representative masters.

In Taiwan the situation was quite different on account of being cut off from the mainland. Taiwan has an active culture of folk religion which for various reasons was not popular in China after 1949 and Taiwanese people are much more comfortable to define culture in a language of supernatural events than people in the mainland. This has led to an infusion of a generalized form of Daoist mysticism into Taiwanese martial arts which significantly diverged from the initial character of the styles during the Chinese republic (1911-1949). The Taiwanese claim until quite recently was that true martial culture died off during the cultural revolution, but this belief became untennable after cultural opening and the international promotion of Chinese martial arts.

As an example, both of my teachers lived during the cultural revolution and their teachers were members of the old generation including direct indoor disciples of Zhang Zhaodong, Cheng Youlong, Tian Zhaolin etc.. These are the legendary figures of the styles to which everyone, including those from Taiwan all appeal to as the standard bearers of the styles. I would like to ask how it is possible that Mr. Wang Chengjie who learned from Tian Zhaolin directly and taught my teacher Yin Qing, or how Mr. Yang Qinglin the grandfather of Master Yang who studied directly under Zhang Zhaodong since childhood could have possibly forgotten their authentic martial arts transmission during the ten years of the cultural revolution? Did Will Smith appear wearing a suit and zap them with a special laser of forgetting?

Thus the induction of Taiwanese spiritual values into the internal martial arts although having some roots in martial thinking during the republic also gradually took on its own character as Taiwanese masters were excluded from the broader community of traditional martial arts in the mainland.

This explains the substantially different perspective held by those figures emerging from Taiwan who make various energetic claims. It should also be noted that Taiwanese culture is substantially more synchretic and open to outside ideas than that of the mainland, thus meaning that many ideas have also filtered in from Japan and the West. A good example is master Su Dongchen who combined Xingyi with Japaense martial arts. This is not meant as an attack on Taiwanese practitioners at all, it is just a statement of various social forces which caused the evolution of martial practice to take on a different form there. In many ways the changes are interesting and valuable, but we need to name things according to their proper names and work to repair the confusion which plagues the community.

In terms of Qigong the historical transformation is even more obvious.

Before 1950 there were no modern Qigong documents and what we call Qigong today largely consisted of disorganized family lineages of life preservation practices. My own family has their own Dao practices passed down at least since the generation of my grandfather in law if not earlier and although they were never formalized into a Qigong system, this was the case for many influential styles such as Nei Yang Gong which formed the first generation of Qigong practitioners in the 50s.

The first generation was typified by a focus on practice and less discussion of theory.

During the suppression of Qigong during the 1970s only a handful of people were allowed to teach in public including Guo Lin who suggested her system of Qigong was essentially medical in nature and used to treat tumors, thus allowing Qigong to acquire a language of medicine which persisted into the development of medical Qigong in Chinese Medicine institutions during the cultural opening of the 1980s. It was at this time that Qigong especially developed a medicalized view of the body and further integrated biological notions about the function of Qi as a way to describe particular processes. At the same time a different branch of Qigong associated with a more Daoist approach also became fortified. This approach has its roots in the early development of Qigong during the 50s and was influenced by Chen Yingning who advocated the idea of stillness practice as a way to tap into the original primordial energy of the universe. It was in the 1980s that these ideas were synthesized with concepts like meridian systems, somatic practices, particle physics and all those things we know from the Qigong fever craze. These ideas were potent and meaningful to tens of millions (if not more) Chinese people who were suddenly granted economic and cultural freedoms not available to them at any other time in history. The impact of the Qigong fever through its development, excess and up to its fall from grace in 1999 was massive and profoundly impactful not just on China but on the whole world. Pretty much the totality of what we conceive of as Qigong today came from that period and the bulk of our understanding of Qigong is defined by the ideas of masters who developed their practice during that time.

This era of practice also seeped into internal martial arts practice in the west on account of Qigong being carried by many Taijiquan teachers, thus our biased and incorrect perspective about what accounts to orthodoxy in the internal arts was largely derived from this confluence of factors which shaped the discourse of the publishing environment of the 1980s, 90s and 2000s.

Qigong had significantly less meaningful impact on internal martial arts in China, although some martial arts styles adopted Qigong practices in place of traditional Neigong (largely centered around sinew changing), so the discussion of these topics in the mainland also tends to be restrained within a relatively smaller area of the martial arts community.

Significant enclaves of that community exist in the Wudang area where Qigong, Daoism, Chinese Medicine and Martial Arts are mashed together in a hellscape of hyper-capitalist wealth acquisition. I’ve written extensively about the origins of internal martial arts at Wudang as a result of Fu jianqiu’s 1929 trip to the area and will not mention it in detail here, sufice to say that Wudang has a lot of soul searching to do if they ever want to truly recapture the authentic Daoism associated with that mountain range, notwithstanding a few exceptional hermits and priests of the old generation who are quickly dying out.

Justification:

Depending on your position in the community you might be having one of four reactions to this article:

1: you don’t care because you don’t have a dog in the fight and aren’t that interested in this topic,

2: you did not previously know much about this topic and are interested but perhaps incredulous about my statements since they actively contradict the received wisdom,

3: you know about the topic and have been nodding your head the whole way through this article, but maybe sometimes finding mistakes in what I’m saying (I don’t know everything about this subject, no one does),

4: you strongly disagree with me and may even be angry and feel attacked.

To address the fourth group, I want to say clearly that I am not attacking anyone and however you and your lineage practice as between you, your teachers and your classmates. All I am trying to do is point out that there is clear literary evidence we can use to trace notions of Qi cultivation back to their sources, analyze them, compare them against modern notions, and try to understand when, how and why the notions changed over time.

Let me be clear, no one in the 14^th century could have imagined either martial artists practicing tendon changing and marrow washing, or modern intention driven Qigong. These ideas were simply not part of the vernacular of that period of history.

China is a diverse country with people of many different perspectives and some people like to promote the idea of an ancient origin of highly sophisticated cultural ideas which was transmitted from 5000 years ago to today while others understand culture as an evolving and changing organic entity which gradually becomes more sophisticated over time.

The way to identify who is telling the truth is as follows:

• claims require justification through evidence and a historical lineage claim of secret oral transmissions is not credible in the face of substantial literature which paints an entirely different picture,

• if a person or group relies on critique of everyone in the community who does not hold their views the only possibilities are that you are dealing with the only authentic holder of wisdom in a certain tradition or that bias is at play.

• There is a substantial body of knowledge about Daoism, martial arts, and Chinese Medicine which can be researched in Chinese and to some extend in foreign languages. It is not perfect and famous historians such as Kang Gewu and Hu Fuchen have their biases, but it is still the most reputable information we have on the subjects.

Martial Arts, Qigong, Daoism and Chinese Medicine are all evolving genres just as are guitar, oil painting and skateboarding. Practices which were not authentic to the original historical conditions of those arts are not automatically incorrect, they are simply relatively new and not fully proven.

As a person who attempts to talk straight about these things in public from a reasonably informed perspective (again, I don’t know everything but I’m doing my best) I often have trouble answering comments where people talk about very specific practices or expected outcomes since while I may have subject knowledge, the application of the knowledge is simply outside of the framework which I understand to be the general nature of the subjects in question.

As an example, someone recently made a claim on my facebook page that he completely cured himself of crepitus through the attainment of “Song” in Taijiquan practice and implied that this was a universal feature of correct practice. I found myself incapable of answering his comment since number one, I disagree that correct practice produces universal and miraculous results and number two, This has never been a major claim made within the mainstream of Taiji, if there even is a mainstream.

My basic position is that as claims become more extreme it is better to exercise caution, humility and the recognition that there are no universals in these practices.

I’m pretty good at using my spine in martial arts practice and I can teach my students how to do it, but I would never make a universal claim that the way I do it is the only correct way or that other schools are lacking something because they don’t have this specific practice. At the same time, it is not well to make such claims about energy practices either since there is no concrete agreement about what the standard is for such things. It is categorically wrong to claim that other people in the community are lacking something, hiding something, or are otherwise incapable because they do not share your sentiments about a certain way of practicing.

It is very good to find your practice rewarding, take benefit from it, be proud of it, and promote it, those are all great attitudes, but remember that these practices are a vast ocean and significantly diverse, spanning a long history, vast geographies, languages, perspectives, understandings, traditions and worldviews and they can’t be essentialized down to one specific right way of doing them. The right way to do things is based on lineage understanding and personal insight, not universal truths.

It took me a long time to write this article, I hope it was useful to you.