#43 Qi

Qi is either one of the greatest insights into the nature of our lives, or one of the greatest delusions. It is the idea that our lives are sustained by an intangible natural energy or life-force that flows through all things. The word is Chinese and comes originally from the steam wafting off freshly cooked rice. But the concept is linked to the Taoist religion, and similar concepts are found all over the world, such as in the Indian prana and the Western tradition of vitalism.

Chinese legend tells that ideas about qi were originally collected about 4,600 years ago by the Yellow Emperor Huang-di, who is credited with inventing the principles of Chinese medicine. But it emerges most strongly between the fourth and sixth centuries BC in the writings of three key Chinese thinkers: Kong Fuzi (Confucius), Mo Zi and, especially, Laozi.[1]

The concept of qi comes from a fundamentally different way of looking at the world from that of the West. While in the West, everything can be seen as either matter or energy; in traditional Chinese philosophy, things are divided into qi, the life-force or energy, and li, which is pattern or form. The Chinese came to terms with things that had little vitality or form by talking about different levels or fractions of qi, from coarse, heavy solids, through lighter, smoother liquids to the life-breath of living things.

All animals are said to have the life-breath. Even the wind has life-breath. But it is at its most refined in humans. In Chinese thinking, the body consists of Essential Substances or energies, Organ Systems and Channels. Qi or ‘breath’ is one of the essential energies and takes various forms. Yuan-qi is the qi that we are born with, and is fixed throughout our lives. But there are various other qis that vary according to how we live our lives, such as xue-qi, which is the qi of the blood.

We are conceived, apparently, when qi accumulates in the universe, and die when it dissipates. The point in thinking about qi is to learn how to maintain and develop our life-force to achieve long life and spiritual power. It’s all about balance and harmony. Balance depends partly on how you breathe, your sex life and your diet. According to Confucius, this is how a man should manage his xue-qi:

The [morally] noble man guards himself against three things. When he is young, his xue-qi has not yet stabilized, so he guards himself against sexual passion. When he reaches his prime, his xue-qi is not easily subdued, so he guards himself against combativeness. When he reaches old age, his xue-qi is already depleted, so he guards himself against acquisitiveness.

The idea behind acupuncture is that the body’s health depends on the unobstructed flow of qi through the body. Qi flows through the body along twelve meridians, or pathways, each linked to a major organ such as the liver or kidney and also with a body system. The pathways get blocked when there is an imbalance in the body, and the purpose of acupuncture is to unblock the channels and get the qi flowing freely and harmoniously again. The art of feng shui, on the other hand, is about placing things, especially in your home or place of work, to control the flow of qi – using colours, shapes and location to slow it down, accelerate it or redirect it. Martial arts such as qigong are about mastering the flow of qi to achieve extraordinary feats of strength, endurance or agility.

Many Chinese people have followed these principles for thousands of years, and similar ideas have surfaced in the West, as well as in India. The idea of a life-force distinct from the biochemical body is known in the West as vitalism and goes back to the times of Ancient Egypt and beyond. In the classical notion of the four humours or elements, the vital force was linked to each. When the four humours were banished to the realm of fiction by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many scientists began to look for a scientific basis for a life-force that they believed was essential to maintain living functions. When electricity was discovered in the late eighteenth century, many believed they had found the life-force. Famous chemist Carl Reichenbach (1788–1869) developed the idea of Odic force. In the 1930s, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, originally part of Freud’s circle in Vienna, spent an enormous amount of energy exploring the idea of orgone, a universal life-force linked to the libido.[2]

Vitalism is now thoroughly discredited in the West as, one by one, its possible functions in the body have been explained by more basic biochemical means. ‘Dualism … and Vitalism (the view that living things contain some special physical but equally mysterious stuff – élan vital),’ writes philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Kinds of Minds, ‘have been relegated to the trash heap of history …’

Yet the concept of qi has been slightly harder to binbag. One reason, of course, is that even the most hardline rationalists in the West are wary of trashing oriental tradition for fear of, perhaps entirely valid, accusations of cultural aggression. A second may be the interest in and moderate success of acupuncture.

Many mainstream Western medical practices now include acupuncture in their range of treatment. This is partly because of demand for it from patients and partly because there are signs that it does have some effect. There are now more than 10 million adults in the US who have used acupuncture at some time in the past, or are using it currently, according to the National Institute of Health. Scientific studies have shown that it actually works for many ailments. They have not shown why, and many still argue that its effectiveness is mainly a placebo. However, some recent scientific studies have indicated that acupuncture may unblock the twisting and knotting of body fibres that effect mechanotransduction, which is the way body cells convert mechanical stimulus into chemical activity. If that’s true, then it might validate acupuncture but undermine the idea of qi.

The idea of qi is rooted in people’s belief that there is something else to life beyond the material and obvious. Over the centuries, the areas that belief can reside in have been eroded by the advance of science, and rigid logicians already insist there is no place for such ideas in the rational mind. Yet there is a logical problem with writing it off entirely. Science is essentially empirical and inductive, and the idea of qi has the empirical ‘evidence’ of thousands of years of testimony on its side. It is, however, essentially un-testable – or at least, no one’s thought of a way to test it yet – so in that sense it has no scientific basis. It is simply a belief. And yet there are many examples of the extraordinary feats of martial artists, for instance, to suggest that the jury can’t quite leave the building yet. And even if it has no physical reality, it may be a priceless metaphor for a way of looking at the world that has, at least, some wisdom.

[1] The collapse of the western half of the Zhou dynasty in the seventh century BC left the remaining eastern half split between countless warring states. It was a period of constant strife and anxiety. Yet it was a time of intellectual ferment and technical innovation, and four great philosophical ideas emerged out of the turmoil, as thinkers tried to work out just why times were so troubled.

The most famous was Confucianism, named after Confucius, the Roman name given by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century to the man his disciples knew as Kong Fuzi (‘Master Kong’). Confucius’ ideas have come down mainly in the form of sayings compiled by his followers in a tract called the Analects. His central belief was that we should seek to live in a good way, always behaving with humanity and courtesy, work diligently and honour properly our family and our rulers. He thought of himself as a conservative in that he was always emphasising the ‘Way of the Former Kings’ in an earlier Golden Age, but in some ways he was quite revolutionary in that he insisted that status should be earned by moral behaviour, not by heredity. Politically, Confucianism championed a highly ordered society.

The second central philosopher of the age was Mo Zi. Mo Zi felt that Confucius’ emphasis on the family could lead to nepotism and clan feuds. He argued in favour of ‘universal love’ – loving and honouring everyone, and looking after others as you would be looked after yourself. This was not, he felt, an idealistic dream, but the only practical way for society to function without strife.

The third philosophy was Taoism, with its central text, the Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way). Legend has it that it was written someone called Laozi, but Laozi simply means ‘Old Master’ and it was probably written by several people. Laozi’s solution to the troubles of the world is to do nothing. His belief is that strife arises because people are constantly striving, and so constantly coming up against opposition and obstacles. He didn’t mean literally doing nothing, but going with the flow, like a stream running to the sea. ‘The Way,’ the Tao Te Ching says, ‘never acts yet nothing is left undone.’ Although nowadays people in the West associate the Way with a state of serenity that is totally apolitical, that is not how it was intended. The Tao Te Ching says that rulers should get on with ruling with no regard to their people, leaving them ignorant and treating them ‘like straw dogs’ – which may be one reason why many rulers took up Taoism. It implied no responsibility of care for the populace.

The fourth Zhou period philosophy was in many ways the flipside to this political Taoism. This was the idea of Legalism, which advocated creating such a complete and rigid framework of law that there was no room for anyone to err. But for this to work, of course, those initiating the laws would have to take over all of China. If both Taoism and Legalism came to colour the thinking of Chinese emperors through the ages, maybe it influenced the attitude of the country’s communist rulers, too.

[2] Famously, Reich built extraordinary machines called ‘cloudbusters’. Clouds, he believed, were accumulations of orgone energy, and the cloudbusters fired orgone at the clouds to make them swell and release their energy as rain.