Origin of the Term "Chi Gong"
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Various sources suggest that the term "Qi Gong" is of recent origin - appearing just a few decades back( though the practice is much older). Thay suggest that the two character term appears nowhere any of the scriptures like the "Daoist Canon".
Could you kindly let me know how far back the term "Qi Gong" can be traced.
Thanking you.
Sincerely,
Dilip Rajeev
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comment by "ChadD" (acupuncturist)
on Jun 2006
This article by Xu Xiangcai on the "History of Qi Gong" has the concepts orginating in dance and going back at least 4,000 years. . He also cites a number of historical references which may be helpful in your research. He also wrote a book - .
According to this qi gong history section, the usage of the ideas goes back at least 3,300 years - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...
Finally, this article - http://kungfuyiquan.free.fr/si... - gives a detailed explanation of the various historic periods of Qi Gong development.
Yin Yang House Acupuncture & Energy Healing Clinic
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comment by "Alabasterjones"
on Apr 2014
David Palmer's Qigong Fever is a very good scholarly account of qigong. In it, Palmer argues that what we now know as Qigong emerged in the 1950s as part of a public health campaign initiated by the Chinese state. That isn't to say that qigong was invented in the 1950s - various aspects of what we know as qigong have been a part of martial, religious and healing traditions for a very long time. In the 1950s, these various disparate elements were systematized into a coherent whole. The first book published using the term qigong was Liu Guizhen's 1957 Qigong Healing Methods.
Chinese martial artis I've spoken to who were alive at the time have told me that nobody called it qigong before that time. The Chinese martial arts, and Traditional Chinese medicine also went through a process of systemization during the early 20th century. As with qigong, they're neither new nor ancient - the old was reformulated in modern times.
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comment by "John_Scalice"
on May 2014
This was the title of an interesting article by Joh Voigt in Qi Journal Volume 23 Number 3, Autumn 2013. In Summary it dates the official adoption of the term to March 3, 1949 to describe a set of exercises developed by Liu Guizhen. It says he took the word from the title of a book published earlier in 1936. The reason for a new term was that the traditional names were unacceptable to the Chinese communists due to their feudal and religious links. The article draws heavily from David Palmer's book.
My Qigong teacher told us the term was not widely used prior to the late 1970s. She said people tended to use more specific system names.
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