Taking a broad look at the history of qigong practice, you first must understand that at the time these practices were developed; they were not called qigong. For the daoist and Chinese medical doctor there was dao yin, and for the buddhist there was the yi jin ching, for example.

Medical

Medical qigong classifies those practices based on traditional Chinese medicine theory with the goal to prevent or cure illness. The types of practice would depend on the condition of the practitioner with the goal of restoring balance and health.

Daoist

Daoist priest’s developed a system of alchemy based around the trigrams of the Bagua. These systems were seeking the elixir of life. The exercises focused the practitioner on the lower Dan Tian, an area below the navel, with the goal of creating an elixir field that could be manipulated through sexual or other physical practices.

Buddhist

The Buddhists were more concerned with liberation from reincarnation and self-observation then the Daoist. The buddhist exercises were more meditative seeking a state of pure consciousness or a “sound mind in a sound body.”

Confucian

The Confucians believed that by creating healthy family you would create a healthy country. This starts with the health of single person. Therefore, it was the responsibility of every individual to exercise daily and to develop into a virtuous person. The exercises are often the same as exercises from other systems, but the goal of the student is to cultivate benevolence, sincerity, respect, and other virtues.

Boxing

Martial qigong developed to improve the efficiency of the muscles, bones, and ligaments to use in a fight. Exercises developed not only physical strength, but mental strength. The ultimate goal was to balance the hardness and the softness by developing the body to be strong on the outside while maintaining suppleness on the inside.

The actual term, qigong, probably arose during the Cultural Revolution as an attempt to integrate Chinese medicine practices with Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian methods of self-cultivation. While the term qigong is relatively new, the practices we now call qigong are quite old. The first explanations and illustrations of such exercises coming from the Zhou Dynasty (122 – 255 BCE). The most famous of these early illustrations is the Dao Yin Illustrations, which depict 44 human figures (drawn in color) with different postures and short captions drawn in black lines.

Dao Yin Illustrations

The Huangdi Neijing–the earliest Chinese medicine reference–summarized theoretical and practical knowledge on health and was the primary reference material on qi and health promoting exercises for centuries.

Qigong is a practice that has taken on mythic qualities. In the early 1950′s Liu Guizhen, a doctor, used his family’s method of qigong practice to cure himself; He wrote a book to promote his system. Later, madam Guo Lin is said to have cured herself of uterine cancer. She was diagnosed at the age of forty and suffered through many operations and setbacks. After eight years she began to practice qigong methods in the park for two hours a day, and within six months she claimed to be cured of the cancer.

Stories like these cross the practical aspect of physical exercise with mysticism that promises miracles. Rather than the movements of a qigong sequence simply being movements, they turn into some sort of spell. I guess that moving this arm this way, followed by that way, will generate a certain response that creates a healing effect on the cells of the body. But, it will only work if you breath a certain way, at a certain time of day, and if you are not healed, then you must have been doing it wrong or chosen the wrong system, or your teacher was a flake. My vote is on the last one.

Qigong is not a magic spell. A more accurate term is calisthenics. Calisthenics are defined as an exercise used to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement; a definition that is not far from the practical definition of qigong presented below.

The need to move something as practical as an enjoyable exercise routine into something that will cure any disease, or cause you to become immortal is a mystery to me. Qigong forms are easy to do, and are accessible to people in many age groups or physical condition. There are sitting, standing, and lying qigong forms that can relax or energize the most harried practitioner.

Set aside the mythical stories and try to arrive at a practical definition of the term. Qi means breath, and gong can mean work, merit, achievement, or practice. So at its most literal qigong is breath work or breath practice. A practical definition is: An exercise set emphasizing breathing techniques and designed to achieve bodily fitness.

Further Study

A good resource for Qigong exercises is SmilingChi.com. The exercises are explained in great detail, including their relationship to the meridians illustrated in the Huangdi Neijing.

Before attempting a rational explanation of qi let me state flatly what qi is not. Qi is not magic. Qi is not a new (or ancient) force that scientists have not discovered or measured. Qi is not electromagnetism or some variant of electromagnetism that acts as a magic force on the world around us.

At its simplest, qi was a way to define and classify all those invisible forces that made the world around the observer function. Consider the wind for instance. What makes the wind move? Without a basic understanding of thermal and fluid dynamics an explanation is difficult, and would depend entirely on your experiences and environment. If you lived near the ocean, you might say that the ocean creates the wind with its vast and rolling waves. If you lived in a desert, you might say that the hot sand reflects the suns energy and causes wind.

If it is difficult to describe the wind, think of how much more difficult it is to describe the growth of a tree or the various functions of a human body. From this need, to describe both the interactions of the world around us and the world within us came several cosmological viewpoints of which qi is but one component of one view.

Qi

The traditional ideogram for qi represents steam rising from rice as it cooks. You can imagine someone seeing steam from boiling water wisp away on air currents and associate that steam as a visible component of air. Because of this association qi is translated as air or breath, or even breath of heaven.

If qi is now both the invisible wind and the visible steam, it must have different qualities at different times. So a hot breath or gust of wind might be called steamy qi, while a cold breeze might be called frigid qi. A strong gust of wind or sudden release of breath is associated to destruction and violence, while a gentle breeze, or relaxed manner of breathing is associated to good health and a pleasant day. Without a framework to contain these associations they would become unwieldily. The first written attempt at a framework was the Huangdi Neijing

In Daoist thought qi has a metaphysical quality, harmonizing the ten thousand things, interconnecting the universe and man. The Confucian school adopted this concept and applied it to yin and yang theory. Neo-Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi’s Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, is the best example of this adaptation.

Qi is also discussed in Daoist alchemy as a method towards immortality. By retaining your life qi, and gaining control of when and how you use it, you can become immortal. The primary methods of such control are meditation, exercise, and sexual practices to generate and retain qi. Formulas of potions and elixirs are purported to add qi to the body, and thus extend life.

As a component of alchemy qi became its own force, and for those that accepted qi as life force outside normal biological or physiological functions, it became something you can manipulate. If you can retain qi, to prolong life, then you must be able to emit qi to heal or harm another. Unfortunately for many of the daoist alchemist the potions were poison that their physical exercises could not overcome.

A more reasonable approach sees qi as something that needs to be put in order, or balanced. With this approach, qi becomes an activity that is transforming the organs of the human body into different states. Associate these states of qi, and human organs to the Five Phases and you have the basis for Chinese medicine.

Finally, a qi driven cosmos meant that there must be a way to anticipate where qi will be in the future, and these attempts to predict the state of qi are called divination. Using yarrow stalks or dice, you can tap into the orderly pattern of the Universe–which is defined by the hexagrams of the Yi Jing–and predict the outcomes of events.

As you can see the simple need to describe something as basic as wind has given rise to an infinite variety of explanations and uses. These attempts, however, only separate qi from its most fundamental definition–that of breath–or create qi as a new force rather than a unifying one.

What is qi? To our physical practice qi is breath, nothing more. To understanding the metaphysical interactions of the Wu Xing or the transformations of the Bagua trigrams, qi is a transformative force. Relating the organs of the human body to the Five Phases, or the physical characteristics of a martial posture to one of the trigrams of the Bagua, does not make qi into something more than this basic definition–breath transforms.

Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate

The historical and more literal definition of wuji is without ridgepole. A ridgepole is a timber laid along the ridge of a roof. Attaching the upper ends of the rafters to this pole creates a sloping roof. Adding a ridgepole to a structure creates a horizontal apex that separates the roof into two halves. This separation is taiji.

Laozi and Zhuangzi were the first to use wuji in a cosmological sense. These daoist philosophers said that by following the Dao the true sage can return to the state of infinity or without pole.

When discussing the martial art of Taijiquan, the concepts of wuji, taiji, yin and yang, and the five phases are illustrated with the Taijitu diagram and its explanation as presented by the Neo-Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi in his Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate. In this work Zhou links the states of wuji and taiji, yin and yang, the five phases, and seasonal changes into one cohesive system that has become a seminal reference.

Wuji and yet taiji. Taiji in generating yang; yet at the limit of activity it is still. In stillness it generates yin; yet at the limit of stillness it is also active. Activity and stillness alternate; each is the basis of the other. In distinguishing yin and yang, the two modes are thereby established. The alternation and combination of yang and yin generate water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. With these five phases of qi harmoniously arranged, the four seasons proceed through them. The five phases are simply yin and yang; yin and yang are simply taiji, taiji is fundamentally wuji.

Further Study

New World Encyclopedia contributors, “Zhou Dunyi,” New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Zhou_Dunyi?oldid=684399