Qi

Summary

Qi 氣 is a Chinese word that first meant vapour and cloud, then breath, the strength that fills the body, and the single stuff that gathers to make things and disperses to unmake them. Today it is also written 气, which the Shuowen jiezi defines as "cloud vapour", a picture of it.

Its clearest story is in the third chapter of the Huainanzi, on heaven. Before heaven and earth had taken form, everything was afloat and indistinct. The Dao began in an empty vastness; the vastness gave birth to space and time, and space and time gave birth to qi. Qi had limits: what was clear and light spread out and became heaven, what was heavy and turbid congealed and became earth. The clear joins easily and the turbid congeals with difficulty, so heaven was finished first and earth settled after. Then the gathered essences of heaven and earth became yin and yang, their essences the four seasons, and the seasons' essences all things. The hot qi of accumulated yang produced fire, whose essence is the sun; the cold qi of accumulated yin produced water, whose essence is the moon.

It is the same story the account of Pangu tells: heaven and earth were mixed like an egg, and the clear rose while the turbid sank. A few lines later in the same chapter Gonggong butts Mount Buzhou and breaks the pillar of heaven. When Wang Chong rejected that story in the first century, he asked: is heaven qi, or a body? If it is qi, like cloud and smoke, how could it have a pillar to break? Lunheng 31.

In human beings qi is the breath of life. In the Zhuangzi Huangdi says: a person's life is a gathering of qi; when it gathers there is life, when it disperses there is death, and so it is said that all under heaven is a single qi. Zhuangzi 22. When Zhuangzi's wife died, his friend came to console him and found him drumming on a basin and singing. Rebuked, he said: at first I grieved, then I looked at her beginning. There was no life, not even form, not even qi; then in the vague confusion something changed and there was qi, the qi changed and there was form, the form changed and there was life, and now it has changed again and there is death, as the four seasons follow each other.

Mengzi 孟子 (Mencius) makes qi a strength to be nourished. The will, he says, commands the qi, and the qi is what fills the body. "I am good at nourishing my flood-like qi." Asked what that is, he says: it is hard to describe; it is the greatest and firmest of things; nourished by uprightness and left unharmed, it fills the space between heaven and earth; it goes with righteousness and the Dao, and without them it starves. Then he tells of a man of Song who was sad that his sprouts did not grow and pulled at them to help them up; when his son went to look, the sprouts had withered. Qi grows by upright work and cannot be hurried.

The idea these texts turn on is that one stuff runs through the world and through the person. At the beginning it divides into heaven and earth; in a person it gathers into life and disperses into death; in conduct it grows strong through uprightness and starves without it. That is why for Zhuangzi death was not the loss of anything, only a change in the shape of qi.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The project's Chinese essay reads qì as Arabic quwwa, strength, and sets beside it Hebrew חַי, ḥay, alive, life. In Lane, quwwa is the contrary of weakness, in the body and in the intellect, and also a faculty: "hearing is a quwwa in the ear by which sounds are perceived". The two readings meet two sides of the texts: the qi that "fills the body" and is "the greatest and firmest of things" in Mengzi is quwwa, and the qi whose "gathering is life" in Zhuangzi is ḥay.

Linguistic Root

The modern reconstruction begins the old word with an aspirated q made at the uvula, *qʰ, in the very place of Arabic q; it became an aspirated k in Middle Chinese and then a sound close to "ch" in Mandarin. So the q of quwwa answers the oldest known pronunciation of the word, the w answers its vowel, and the final y of q-w-y stands where the long vowel stands. The ḥ of ḥay answers the same sound from another side, since an aspirated q and ḥ are both made at the back of the mouth and throat, and throat letters alternate and drop between languages. The point that needs explaining is a p at the end of the old word, lost before Middle Chinese, which appears in neither quwwa nor ḥay.

The essay groups qi with Indian prāṇa and Egyptian ka as "vital energy" and treats it as an idea common to many peoples. Vāyu in India is the wind of the world and the breath of a person at once, and in Hebrew ḥay, living, is said of God himself in the phrase "the living God".

Key Mythic Narratives

In its sixth chapter the Zhuangzi says that Fuxi obtained the Dao "and so entered the mother of qi", giving qi a mother to which the first of the founders returns. Zhuangzi 6. In the Daodejing all things carry yin and embrace yang, "and blend qi to reach harmony". Daodejing 42. In the third chapter of the Huainanzi qi becomes wind and rain: the slanting qi of heaven, when angry, becomes wind; the held qi of earth, when calm, becomes rain; and when yin and yang strike each other there is thunder.

Symbolic Reading

The rereading essay reads the yin-yang pair as a duality within matter itself, matter and energy, and the Semitic-reading essay reads qi as vital energy. The early texts offer a simpler picture that everyone knows: steam rising from water, breath leaving the chest on a cold day, cloud gathering and scattering. From these visible things the Chinese took a word to describe how the light became heaven and the heavy earth, and how a person lives and dies.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In Vedic poetry Vāyu, the wind, comes from the breath of the cosmic person, and the Upanishads pair wind with prāṇa, the breath of life. Qi likewise joins the wind outside a person and the breath in his chest. At his death Pangu's breath becomes wind and cloud, after the cosmic body pattern. Qi differs from Vāyu in that it is not a person to be invoked and given offerings, but the stuff everything is made of.