气 Where is my Bowl of Rice?

練劍莫先於煉气*

Training the sword cannot be done without first refining the Qi

"Listen, swordmanship is the discipline and training of the Great Vitality. So you begin this study by training the ch'i by means of technique. After your beginning studies, you will discipline your ch'i, but move away from technique; yet, there should be no point where you try your hand vacantly. You should become mature in your discipline of ch'i, and master the mind"**

气 is a notion very particular to the Chinese culture, not only a polysemous word, but also a riddle to solve in the old practices. That makes it a complex and hard notion to deal with. But since it is, in most cases, an integral part of Chinese martial arts, leaving out this notion would be like wanting to make wine in France without taking into consideration the "terroir".

气 or 氣?

First, let's take care of the elephant that came through the copy/paste grapevine: 氣 represents vapour coming from a bowl of rice.

There are a few pitfalls when one wants to understand the origins of a Chinese character, one being that the simplified form, even if the simplification occurred last century in mainland China, can actually be also the original character, the older, or even eldest one. Indeed, one of the methods of simplification was to look if, in its older versions, the character was not written in a simpler way. 气 happens to be exactly the case, an original pictogram meaning cloud vapour, "雲气也。象形". No rice and bowl there.

氣 not only came after but also did not replace instantly 气 , it originally meant something different, "presenting guest with provisions" as it is generally admitted or, maybe, "offering guests a nice feast", "饋客芻米也", depending on which meaning to confer to 芻, hay or livestock feed with hay. 米, rice, appears in this definition, but it is probably more in its meaning of grain, rice not being the only grain used for food in China. So, 氣 is not defined as a pictogram and seems definitively to be more a character invented later on for a new meaning. It is only with time that it finally replaced the original one, 气, adding the new meaning of "offering guest with provisions", though a new character for this latter one was invented, 餼. So, the only recognised pictogram being 气, representing cloud vapours, and the original meaning of 氣 being "offering guest with provisions", one can wonder where this bowl of rice came from. 

If studying martial arts in China is stopping the halberd with vapour coming from a bowl of rice, or even from clouds, what one wouldn't do for the art... of poetry. So, what does this notion have to do with training martial arts?

Starting with a Basic Idea

One of the meanings of 气 is vigour, vitality. Chinese martial arts usually consider that strength comes both from physical force and vigour.  Physical force comes from the body, the muscles being the most obvious part of it, while vigour impacts strength but remains almost invisible. As mentioned before, vigour makes the body reach peak performance, or the opposite, without any visible change (like muscle mass). It is generally linked with our lifestyle (rest, food...) and can change swiftly during the day. Emotions or mental fatigue can have a direct impact on physical performance. For the old practices, emotions and mental pondering reduce one's vigour by depleting 气, which reduces his/her strength. Same body but lesser performance.

So 气 is or leads to vigour, a great part of one's strength, but what is it and how do we produce it? 气 being invisible and impalpable, and an evolving notion, it is way too complex to give a precise and definite definition. They are almost endless writings about the subject, which makes that one can get really lost, if not in translation, just in basic understanding.

However, because 气 as the origin of vigour is one of the two central notions around which internal arts revolve, it definitively will come up in further posts. Hence the necessity to, at least roughly, try to understand the logic behind it.

Internal alchemy, through which 气 and more are produced, is also a quite complex process including concepts like the Cinnabar Fields or Burners needing by themselves a separate explanation. 气 being an evolving notion defined by trends, it seems more appropriate to start with its simpler version. That is why below is just the most simple explanation, one understanding among others, certainly not an extensive study about all the possible meanings of 气 in general or as applied to training. So, to make it as simple as possible, one can just start from the close relation that 气 has with blood. The latter nourishes the body while the former nourishes the mind/soul. The blood brings vital elements to the body, so does the 气 to the mind/soul. We might not know what exactly are those vital elements as far as the 气 is concerned, but we can have an idea where they mainly come from with the phrase "精能化气", "essence can transform into vapours". So what is this essence and how does it transform? One explanation often seen is that 精 is the short for 精液, semen. In order to balance this male chauvinist explanation, it would extend to ovaries for the fairer sex. The idea would be, then, for men to either keep their semen and find a way to send it back inside the organism before it dies or use and/or produce less of it, and to reach a point with no more periods for the ladies. Another explanation considers that 精液 stands for "猶津液" and "猶精華", body fluids and quintessence, so that 精 is the quintessence of the body fluids that you mainly find in the organs, and especially the kidneys. To start on the easier side, let's just consider the latter. Essence is fluids contained in the organs. Liquid, they nourish the body, vaporised, they nourish the mind/soul. The liquid nourishing the body are more or less the nutrients that some organs create through digestion. To transform this into vapour, they would need heat, hence the "can" in essence can transform into vapours, so an active process. And how would you create this heat? Simply through any kind of physical exercise that makes you sweat like running, lifting weights... no need to take weird postures to create vapour. If you create vapours outside while sweating, you will tend to also create some inside where it is even hotter.

Going back to the dictionaries, in the explanation of the pictogram, it is said that 气 has the appearance of rising clouds "象雲起之皃". For some practices, this phrase is important because it can refer to vapours rising from a field in the early morning. Early morning was considered to be a good time to train in the old days, because dawn is the time where "heaven and earth" exchange. Dew and morning fog, or just vapours rising from the soil, are the results of such exchange. This is such a process one would try to recreate it in its own body by making the organs warm through exercise, hence 气. Recreating at the same time the same process undergone by heaven and earth in one's body, in order to be one with Mother Nature. For those who are aware of the Eight Trigrams Theory, the aim was to change the heating of the organs from ☲, 離, to ☵, 坎.

Of course they are a lot of other definitions of 气, even in martial practices, other ways to write it, including the very Taoistic 炁, which leads to another approach and contains a clue for the training to improve breathing through skin.

Arts that put vitality first and/or at the centre of their training, as illustrated in the two beginning quotes, are in essence internal ones.

Finally, as it is mentioned in "About this blog" on the right side, no truth or scientific demonstration here, but just a try to explain a certain logic and give some clues for those who are interested by the old methods.

*Sword of Chaos, Bikun, Ming Dynasty. 渾元劍經, 畢坤, 明朝 

**The Demon's Sermon on Martial Arts and Other Tales, Issai Chozanshi, translated by William Scott Wilson. 天狗芸術論, 佚斎 樗山子