Chapter 6: The Japanese Conception of Ki

I believe that the bodily sensation of ki is commonly present in human experience but that the form taken by the interpretation of this sensation varies from culture to culture. For example, the logical aspect is much more developed in Western languages than in the Japanese language. In Western languages, there does not exist and this is one of the major difficulties for translation a word equivalent to ki. In Japanese this term covers various sensations and impressions that are mysterious, vague, and intangible, that touch upon something in the deepest part of our being, something that is connected with a level of insight that is probably archaic or repressed.

This difficult to define body of impressions is present in the experience of the everyday life, the literature, and the arts of Japan. When it is necessary to name it, people call it ki.

The exclusion of these sensations and impressions from the explicit terminology of Western languages seems to me to be a corollary of the logical character of these languages. Rational thought probably developed through the repression of this sensibility. Space is pervaded by different energies, and we know that this space exists without being able to define its content. Daily we use television sets, radios, and portable telephones that use electromagnetic waves that are neither visible nor tangible without special equipment. It was only in relatively recent times that science was able to demonstrate the existence of these waves. However, when it comes to ki, it is not rare for people who consider themselves rational to reject the idea a priori, because ki is not tangible and doubtless more profoundly because it is connected with subjective experience. The fact is that ki is not an abstract conception; it is a conception that arises out of listening to the bodily sensations through which one perceives one's environment and also, at the same time, the manner in which one is situated within it.

Ki is felt by means of the body and is given a more or less defined representation depending on the culture in question. The sensation of ki is intensified when speculative self-consciousness is pushed into the background. This happens to varying degrees depending on how much people are willing to let go of their ego in deferring to what surrounds them. If ego is reinforced, the sensation of ki diminishes. In a certain way, the state of mind of heightened ki awareness runs counter to the Cartesian process. In being attentive to the sensation of ki, you dissolve into your surroundings through the effacement of the central sensation of your own existence. This attitude is at the root of the different techniques for strengthening ki.

These techniques, which were religious in origin, have also long been used for therapeutic purposes. Today in Japan and China, methods of therapy are being developed in which such techniques are separated from their mystical origins and applied in tandem with medical means for healing by stimulating ki. In Japanese, ki is not defined by clarifying its characteristics; rather the term is used when one feels the presence of something that cannot be clearly grasped. The Japanese language leaves an undefined space in its mode of expression. It seems to me that it is only by means of the body that we can explore this space; in clarifying the role of this space, we can advance in the area of physical technique.

The same ideogram is pronounced qi in Chinese and ki in Japanese. Even though the meaning is similar for the most part, there are certain differences between the Japanese idea of ki and the Chinese idea of qi. In both countries, disciplines intended to develop the capacity for qi or ki have existed for a long time. They have been propagated since the 1970s under the name qigong in Chinese and kiko in Japanese. In the present work, I shall limit myself to attempting to shed light on the Japanese conception of ki as it applies to the domain of the martial arts.

According to Japanese thought, ki is an entity that enables life and the existence of things in the universe. It is thus more than "vital energy," as it is usually translated. Ki exists in things that appear to us to be devoid of organic life, such as stones, and also in natural phenomena like wind or rain. Ki also resides in mountains, in the sea, and so on. Seen in this way, ki appears as an extension of primitive animist thought. Nonetheless, today when civilization is confronted with a different set of problems, including the destruction of natural environments, this line of thought, rejected for a time as archaic, is now raising new questions.

A number of trends exist today that are attempting to recover qualities of the human being that are supposed to have been lost in the course of "progress." There is no doubt that the sharpness of our senses of hearing, smell, touch, and sight, which played a vital role in the distant past, has been dulled, as our senses have been supplanted by material devices. This has caused questions to be raised about other perceptive capacities that modern humans might have lost and has brought about interest in various methods for achieving well-being. Research in this area has brought to light buried perceptive capacities of the body and has led to the discovery of a new level of perception, which scientific advances have made accessible. Many attempts have been made to find scientific explanations for the mysteries hidden in the human being. Freud's concept of libido touches upon this profound something-or-other in human nature, and I believe it coincides partially with the idea of ki.

In the perspective that developed in Japan, studying and developing ki in the practice of budo or kiko consists on the whole of becoming sensitive to the ki in one's own body, then to the external phenomenon of ki, and finally to the ki of the universe. This implies being permeable to the ki of the universe and feeling that one's body is part of the universe filled with ki.

At the stage where the sensation of ki is sufficiently developed, the ki of the body is in harmony with the ki of the universe. The various methods of kiko are methods through which people seek to become permeable to the reality of universal ki. The ultimate stage of the practice of kiko is furen shuten, in which the body becomes permeable to ki to the highest possible degree. At that point, you have mastery over ki without the slightest intention. You are in free communication with the universal ki; without needing exercises, you live with ki. This is the ultimate stage, the ideal aimed at by those who practice kiko.

The idea of universal ki can be made compatible with Western thought only with difficulty, but I must stress that implicitly or explicitly it is essential to the Japanese conception of ki.

Without reaching the point of furen shuten, when we have sufficiently developed our sensitivity to ki, we become aware that our mental activity is inseparable from that of ki. At this level, we can feel a correlation between words and ki; in connection with words ki is subject to more or less weighty pressures. The fact of naming things, of precisely defining the sense of things or the sense of our actions, inevitably brings about a modulation of our ki, because the contour of ki as it is defined by the words, when the meaning is narrowly circumscribed, eliminates any latent meaning. Clarifying and defining implies eliminating or suppressing the vague and imprecise contours of the latent sense. This way of defining it in words implies a reduction of ki, which is always global, holistic. Thus to name a feeling of love represses the hatred that is contained in it. Buddhism teaches us to confront this conglomerate of feelings without basing distinctions on circumscribed oppositions as in the Western style. Thus "love" can be translated by ai and "hate" by nikushimi(zo), but a maxim of Buddhist origin affirms that the two amount to the same thing.

If we constitute ourselves as social beings by means of words, at the same time the cutting-up of things that the words imply eliminates a part of the reality of our lived experience and, as a result, shuts out a significant part of the ki. Thus it is not by chance that the Taoists as well as the Buddhists seek a mental state that is detached from the system of words. They seek to grasp the essence of things without delimiting and deforming it through words. This is the state of emptiness or nonthought.

Thus the system of words with which we are so deeply impregnated is also one of the obstacles encountered in the practice of ki.

However, we are not at all suggesting trying to regain the state of a primitive human being. We are talking about an effort to recover or reestablish the qualities, the sensitivities, or the faculties that we have lost in the course of the development of our civilization. In a certain way, kiko aims at endowing the civilized being with primitive qualities that we have lost. So it is not a question of attempting to go backward. On the contrary, we are talking about an effort on the part of civilized beings to go beyond the barriers with which they have been confronted and about their doing this by mobilizingtheir own means to reestablish faculties that are still potentially present.

Words appear, ki is modulated in accordance with their sense, and it is reduced in the process. How can we detach ourselves from words while living with language? This is one of the keys to the methods of kiko. In kiko, we use images, sounds, and movements rather than words in order to increase depth beyond words, in order to lead our being into the world of ki.