alternative forms
for the concept of qi (氣）
6
‘Qi’, sometimes transliterated as chi or ch’i, is a well-known concept in the worlds of Chinese medicine, philosophy, martial arts and geomancy. A traditional etymology suggests that the concept originally developed from the idea of clouds or mist and from there, by extension, the idea of breath. However, as the list below shows, there were many ways of writing down this concept and the different forms of the characters below suggest a few different ideas were in play when nailing down this all-important concept in Chinese thought.
6
alternative forms
for the concept of qi (氣)
The concept of ‘qi’, sometimes transliterated as chi or ch’i is a well-known concept in the worlds of Chinese medicine, philosophy, martial arts and geomancy. A traditional etymology suggests that the concept originally developed from the idea of clouds or mist and from there, by extension, the idea of breath. However, as the non-exhaustive list below shows, there were many ways of writing down this concept and the different forms of the characters below suggest a few different ideas were in play when nailing down this all-important concept in Chinese thought.
CULTURAL NOTE
Qi is thought by many to be a quasi-mystical element and, though it can have cosmological and esoteric applications, the word is also used in a much more down-to-earth way, both on its own and in any number of compounds. One common assumption by non-speakers of Chinese is that this concept is the ‘Chi’ of ‘Tai Chi’ (the popular system of physical exercises) This is a false friend, in fact, due to the confusion of transliteration – the Chinese name for this activity is 太極拳 tai ji quan, sometimes translated as ‘grand ultimate fist’.
气
qi #1
This character, now the simplified form of 氣 used in the PRC, is one of the earliest forms of qi. It was on this basis that Xu Shen 許慎 (30–124 CE), argued that the concept of qi arose from the idea of mist/fog. However, the very earliest forms of the character from around 1000 BCE actually referred to 乞 ‘to seek, to arrive, to reach’ and 气 meaning ‘mists’ was used as a homophone stand-in from around 400 BCE onwards.
㫓
qi #2
This older form recalls the meaning above, containing as it does the element 乞 which means ‘to reach, to arrive’ or ‘to seek’.
qi #3
This character combines the ‘mist’ element (气) with ‘fire’ (火) and was the graph used in the earliest reference to qi as the movement of breath around the body. (Incidentally, this character is obscure to be missing from this font’s character set, hence the use of an image here.)
炁
qi #4
This character lacks the ‘mist’ element entirely, with fire (火) along the bottom as the semantic element, and 旡 as the phonetic element carrying the sound.
暣
qi #5
This version of the character combines ‘mist’ (气) with grain (米), a very similar character to ‘fire’ (火).
餼
qi #6
Here ‘mist’ (气) and ‘grain’ (米) combine with the element meaning ‘food’ (食). This character later came to mean ‘sacrifice’ or ‘provisioning’.
References
- Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (2022). The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
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