Neidan, Daoyin, Qi Gong
Qi Gong is often translated as “accumulated work of life force,” which denotes not one specific contemporary health practice, but two schemes of ancient Chinese practices. One is Neidan, “the inner alchemy,” a meditative practice. And the second is Daoyin, “pulling and directing,” a gymnastic practice. Because the contemporary Qi Gong practice is a multifaceted accretion of a variety of practices with a broad range of religious, pop-cultural, and scientific ideas, which in turn are essentially based on the Neidan and Daoyin practices, there are no formally established systems or categories of Qi Gong practice.
The idea of Qi (Chi, Ki) is one of the most difficult but imperative of all Chinese concepts to understand. Due to its indigenous and ambiguous nature, the early scholars and translators on Chinese thoughts and culture showed an intriguing reluctance in the discussion of Qi. Only in recent decades has the idea of Qi forced its way into the West through the practice of Qi Gong in both healing techniques and martial arts. This social phenomenon in turn has arrested the enthusiasm of the contemporary elite academics as well as lay people.
Angus C. Graham (Yale) and Benjamin I. Schwartz (Harvard), the leading Western authorities on Chinese thought, language, and textual criticism, prefer to leave Qi untranslated but suggest Qi as the closest Chinese approximation of the Western concept of “matter.” Qi, Graham writes, is “adapted to cosmology as the universal fluid, active as Yang and passive as Yin, out of which all things condense and into which they dissolve…it is like such words in other cultures as Greek pneuma ‘wind, air, breath’. It is the energetic fluid which vitalizes the body, in particular as the breath, and which circulates outside us as the air.”
Regarding the translation of Qi into English as “energy,” Schwartz cogently describes, “ch’i comes to embrace properties which we would call psychic, emotional, spiritual, numinous, and even ‘mystic.’ It is precisely at this point that Western definitions of ‘matter’ and the physical which systematically exclude these properties from their definitions do not at all correspond to ch’i.” “To the extent that the word ‘energy’ is used in the West to apply exclusively to a force that relates only entities described in terms of physical mass, it is as misleading as ‘matter’, I think, as an over-all name for ch’i.”
All living beings not only survive but also prosper by Qi, the matter or force of life. There is no “good” or “bad” matter or force, by any moral standard. In the same way, there is no absolute “good” or “bad” Qi, but only the harmonized Qi that circulates efficiently in a living body and supports life. Therefore, a harmonized circulation of Qi is the essential for life according to Chinese thought. When Qi is blocked within the body system, it builds up in the area where it may not be needed. It is like too much water overflowing a riverbed and resulting into floods, the body will manifest emotional imbalance or physical sickness. Such imbalance of Qi flow will affect the entire body, and ultimately, result in illness and death.
There are three sources for the theoretic foundation of Qi Gong: 1) Taoist and Buddhist philosophies, 2) the Chinese cosmology including the Yin and Yang and Five-phase theory, and 3) Chinese medicine. However, commonly among all three are the essential Qi Gong techniques that combine focused visualization and mental concentration with balanced breathing in a controlled way
Traditionally, movements associated Qi Gong or gymnastics such as the Eight Sections of Brocade, the Five Animal Plays, are considered as inferior to the more meditative practice, such as Neidan. The YeYoung Neidan practice, or the YeYoung Inner Alchemy focuses on the Southern Neidan School that was founded by the Southern Patriarch Zhang Boduan (984-1028). It is a technique of enlightenment, not much a doctrine but a practice achieved by exercising the techniques of enhancing health and longevity.
Unlike some meditation practices only dwell on xing, or the original nature in its pristine purity, and wish to attain in an intuitive and immediate vision, but neglect ming, fate and earthly life, YeYoung Neidan practice approaches from cultivating of the fate and earthly life, awakening the original nature. Only when the original nature and fate and earthly life are united, they join in the “non-action that is the action,” the ultimate enlightenment is attained. Without the fate and earthly life, the original nature will forever be stuck in inactive emptiness; without the original nature, the fate and earthly life will never attain perfect non-action.