"qi" 炁

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"qi" 炁

Postby bailewen on Sun Feb 18, 2018 4:51 am

Paging Wong Yuen-ming...

Anyone familiar with this term? As in qiti/气体, typicially translated as "energy body" but I have a kung fu/gi gong "poem" (口诀) which , instead of the more familiar 气, instead, refers to, 炁 which I can't even type with my phone, sougou or Google pinyin. Maybe it's like 掤 where you have to use a different pinyin to get it to show up.

Anyone have any ideas how 炁 differs from 气?

Omar

p.s.
posting in the main forum because it's part of a taiji saying I'm trying to figure out. Happy to take this to "off the topic" if the word "qi" is too sensative :P
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby windwalker on Sun Feb 18, 2018 5:19 am

It translates as air or gas.
The energy field you spoke of is referred to as a qi chong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EugsOnYj7nA&t=2
高壮飞谈太极拳经络与场

Master Guo,,,"wu style" talks about it

hope it helps

happy new yr ;)
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby bailewen on Sun Feb 18, 2018 5:24 am

happy dog year

thanks for the link
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby Franklin on Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:02 am

this just came up tonight..
my son and wife were reading something and they did not know the character 炁
hahaha -- felt good to step in and tell them its just an older way to write 气
(mainly because they always point out how terrible my chinese is.. lol)


I though the 2 characters were the same meaning..
just 炁 is an older way to write it...
and 气 is the more modern way (and simplified)

curious to hear if there is something I am missing..


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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby Bao on Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:22 am

It's just another way to write "qi" = 气

Sometimes, especially in old literature and philosophical texts, characters can be written differently due to the authors specific interpretation or what aspect of the meaning he or she is focusing on. Like in the Guodian Daodejing manuscript, the character for "De" is not the common known and consists of only two parts: a heart below and cross above, meaning an upright heart and thus signifying the moral aspect of the concept.
Last edited by Bao on Sun Feb 18, 2018 7:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby edededed on Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:45 pm

气 is the oldest version - as just a pictograph of vapor (i.e. breath).

氣 came later - adding rice. This matches with the idea of zhenqi, i.e. air (kongqi) + nutrients (guqi).

炁 I believe came later still - components are more confusing now, but the bottom is fire, which matches with "heating" sitting practices (and the analogies with creating the external elixer). The top is an old glyph that means "choke," but I think it also looks like the simple version of 無 (e.g. 无) (the PRC uses it now, but it also goes back to jiaguwen, in various forms). Coincidentally perhaps, it would result in "nothingness" (emptying the mind) with "fire" underneath.

(But today most people just use their standard variant (for the region).)
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby bailewen on Sun Feb 18, 2018 11:04 pm

...but the bottom is fire...


Water actually. "Steam" if you want to keep the metaphor. BTW, is anyone else here able to type it or are you all just copy-pasting it like I am.

When I was transcribing the song Shifu explained it as a 无 with water underneath (加上四点谁), and that's how I found the character online to copy-paste it (Baidu'd "无字加上四点谁")

Handwritten, I just used a straight up 无 but I do see the top half is not quite the same. It's supposed to be a 无 AFAIK.

It's just another way to write "qi" = 气

That's what he told me at the time but if it really didn't have a difference in meaning, why the insistence that this particular song use this particular character? A little poking around online and it seems like at least one difference is that nobody uses 炁 for any of the myriad of compound words like 天气 or 气球. So maybe it's just to emphasize that this is 元气的气 and not some other, more plebeian concept of the character.
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby Franklin on Sun Feb 18, 2018 11:49 pm

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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby edededed on Mon Feb 19, 2018 12:27 am

Water? The four dots are just a smooshed 火, e.g. in 照, 煮, 煎, etc. I guess that the radical's nickname can make it confusing, but the origin as fire is clear if you look at the zhuanwen forms of the characters.

I vaguely remember hearing a Chinese guy tell me that in Daoism there were special nuances sometimes when using these rare variants (like 炁; another is 靝 (e.g. variant of 天)), but I don't know!

(I get all the fun variants not from an input method, but from the awesome zdic.net dictionary - just look up a character and click on the 字源字形 tab. Some wild variants for "Che" (car) for example, but RSF barfs if I try to post them. Also shows you how much codespace they use for these tens of thousands of hanzi variants...)
Last edited by edededed on Mon Feb 19, 2018 12:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby bailewen on Mon Feb 19, 2018 6:02 am

That could totally be the etymological origin. But the radical is water.<--I was wrong. I guess folks just call it that ???

All you have to do is Google, or Baidu 四点水. I have noticed the relationship to heat too, but since it isofficially referred to as a "4 waters" radical, I like to think of it as "steam".

OTOH:
https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/3a2f7 ... 61134.html

This source calls it "heat" (热气), which matches my "steam" theory:
http://www.xitongzhijia.net/xtjc/20170909/106475.html

edit:
I guess it probably is "fire"
http://hanyu.baidu.com/zici/s?wd=%E7%81 ... 0&from=kg0

hm...maybe they call it 四点水 because it just rolls of the tongue easier than 四点火 or 火字下. :P
Last edited by bailewen on Mon Feb 19, 2018 6:10 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby bailewen on Mon Feb 19, 2018 6:14 am

Franklin wrote:http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_475178b40102ws1a.html

might find this interesting...

God dammit Franklin!

I was gonna post that that looked a lot too much like "work" for me to read while I am on vacation but it's clearly exactly what I was asking with the OP...

*sigh*

Now I have to go and read the damn thing...
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby Franklin on Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:32 am

bailewen wrote:
Franklin wrote:http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_475178b40102ws1a.html

might find this interesting...

God dammit Franklin!

I was gonna post that that looked a lot too much like "work" for me to read while I am on vacation but it's clearly exactly what I was asking with the OP...

*sigh*

Now I have to go and read the damn thing...



hahaha..

i just glanced at it...
I don't have time to go through it..
but it seemed thorough...


the only other thing i could find online about the character..
http://fiveseasonsmedicine.com/integrat ... meridians/
in a footnote:
=================
[5] Strictly speaking the original sense of the character Qi (氣) is ‘steam, air’, not ‘energy’. This provokes a lot of delusions. Such an competent dictionary as Shuo Wen Jie Zi (6) states that more ancient variant of the character Qi (氣) ‘ ‘rice food’ is the character having in its base the same grapheme and same pronunciation Qi (气), ‘steam, air’. However, in old dictionaries there are some different ways of writing the character Qi (氣), which let see connection with the character Qi having a different composition (炁). Etymology of this sign is connected with flame of ‘fire’ (in the bottom 灬), and swallowing (in the top ‘to swallow food by big pieces’ 既, not with ‘absence’ Wu 无 , that some contemporary ‘masters’ of Qi Gong state). This is supported by several competent ancient writings. So, according to ‘Yu Pian’ the character 炁 (the character which is often meant in the Qi Gong practice) is a more ancient variant of the character (氣) (‘gaz’, and ‘rice’). Hence, the meaning of the character goes back to the concept ‘to swallow the fire’. See more details (5,6,8).
===================


this is also interesting
http://qi-encyclopedia.com/?article=The ... 20for%20Qi

edit-- the charcaters did not come through on the copy and paste for some reason-- the artile will make more sense at the source link above...

The Daoist Character for Qi

By Ken Rose



A special character unique to Daoists texts and talismans.

: This is a special character found usually in Daoist texts and talismans. It has the same basic meaning and is pronounced the same as qi , though obviously it is a different perspective or way of looking at qi...or why bother with a special character? Those unfamiliar with Chinese characters can misinterpret this character. What might look like the conjunction of nothing and fire (takes the shape of those four dots at the bottom of the character when it is used as a combining element in characters) is actually the meeting place of a more complex character...no pun intended...

Wu is indeed the simplified form of wu, but it was also an ancient character that had the same significance, i.e., nothing, negation, absence of, etc. However, is not, precisely the component of . If you look closely you'll see an additional vertical stroke. The component of is ji. Compare the two side by side , and it is clear. Among the treacheries of Chinese written language, one of the most treacherous is the fact that the addition or deletion of a single stroke or dot can utterly change the meaning of a character. Pity the poor scribes who struggled endlessly with a language requiring such attention to detail.

The bottom component is fire, so we don't need to focus too much on that aspect of the character, except to point out that here in we definitely encounter the metaphoric or metaphysical meaning of fire, as it is understood as a member of a set of such metaphor known as wu xing or five phases, elements, agents, and so on. We'll come back to the implications of the presence of fire in once we have examined .

What does ji mean? Well, it's a fairly rare character that means...something stuck in your throat, or getting something stuck in your throat, or feeling like there's something stuck in your throat... or there might be or could be.

Based upon oral teaching I received in China from Daoist monks on Qing Cheng Mountain outside of Chengdu I believe that in this character what we're seeing is an encoded instruction about the tongue and breathing. The tongue, in qi cultivation practices, is often placed on the roof of the mouth. In this position, pressing gently upwards and forwards into the back of the top teeth, it pulls the throat open a slight bit...just enough to ensure the free passage of any saliva that might fill the mouth during practice. This saliva is a treasure.

When the character is read in this way we can see it as a mnemonic for the notion of the union of fire and water, such as is sought in alchemical techniques and methods in order to obtain the ephemeralization of essence, i.e., refining jing into qi, which is the second step of an ancient alchemical formula still taught and practiced by Daoist novitiates.

Daoists considered the world as a manifestation of the Great Void, Tai Xu , and this special qi was a vital ingredient in Daoist formula meant as efforts to find the Elixir of Immortality, dan, which we associate with the location and practices known under the rubric dan tian . In this context can be considered as the main way station on the dao of returning to the Great Void .

Thus emerged as a special Daoist term, found in magical inscriptions, talismans, and accompanying texts. The aim of these texts and talismans lay often in the domain of self-accomplishment and self-refinement. And the flavor of this character emphasizes that it emanates from an interior realm in which the body's innate treasures serve as the primary ingredients.
Last edited by Franklin on Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby edededed on Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:50 am

Super-long article, but very good! :D I just skipped most of the examples to read the conclusion... (But I am tired already, will finish it later!)
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby taiwandeutscher on Mon Feb 19, 2018 5:42 pm

Bai, the character is easily found under win 10, Chinese Big 5.
Ed, I use the same dictionary, lol!
Frank, yes, nice essay!
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Re: "qi" 炁

Postby Wuyizidi on Mon Feb 26, 2018 12:11 pm

Actually it's fairly straightforward:

Language and writing evolve over time, and often the characters are interchangeable in meaning. Except in the area of Daogong text, where every character has very specific meaning beyond ones used by the general population, known only to people formally initiated into the tradition. A good way to judge the seriousness/faithfulness of modern editions of Daogong/Qigong text is the use of words like these:

Qi:
炁: xian tian qi
氣: hou tian qi (heaven - energy from air, earth - energy form food, etc, and human)


Medicine:
Image:internal medicine (ie Dan)
药: external medicine (herbs, minerals, etc)
Last edited by Wuyizidi on Mon Feb 26, 2018 12:19 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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