Every book I’ve ever read on Chinese internal martial arts or chi gung (also spelled qigong) uses this expression toward the beginning and then over and over again: “Remember to sink the chi to the dantian.” But what does it mean?
First, I think most of the authors of these books have no idea what it means, the meaning having been forgotten, so they simply parrot the expression in the same way they imitate and revere Daoists with their complicated philosophies and meditations. This should come as no surprise, since the “Chinese internal martial arts,” claimed as jewels of one the oldest and most venerable philosophies of China — Taoism or Daoism — have become a brand, like much else. In fact, Daoism absorbs more and more every day, and becomes older and older. In today’s China, everything sprang out of Daoism originally — even Indian yoga and philosophy. According to modern Daoists, it was the enfeebled and confused monks residing at Shaolin Temple in the 6th century who taught the Indian sage Bodhidharma yoga and meditation — not the other way around.
That poor fellow Bodhidharma left India for China to spread the Dharma, sailed for three years around the Bay of Bengal and the Malay Peninsula to avoid Huns, finally arriving, around 25 years later,1 at the newly built Shaolin Temple in central Honan province to sit at the feet of Daoist masters and learn from them. That’s why, to this day, Bodhidharma’s name and legend are synonymous with Shaolin Temple. I’m being sarcastic, of course, but you get the idea. To speak plainly, Daoism is being promoted by the Chinese Communist Party as a homegrown and harmless philosophy and religion preferable to all others, and the message has been spread to Chinese cultural studies departments in universities all over the world. In fact, modern Daoism is a counterfeit.
Back to “sinking the chi.” First, I suppose we need to define terms. So what is chi or qi? Chi is breath, the vital energy of breath. Life itself is measured by breath — from your “first breath” until your “last” or “dying breath.” The heart pumps, to be sure, but life is measured not by the heartbeat but by the breath. Moreover, the heart can only pump by using oxygen, and only pumps in order to transmit that oxygen to the rest of the body — therefore even the heartbeat is secondary to the breath. Chi, in its original and direct form, means “air” or “breath.”
What is the dantian? Very simply, it’s a balloon-shaped region in the lower abdomen, between the belly button and the pelvic bone, to which the internal martial arts and qigong give outsize importance.
And what does “sinking” mean? If chi, on a physical level, is the oxygen in your blood, then how you breathe matters. If a person has a shallow, ragged breath trapped in the shoulders and the upper chest, that’s precisely where chi will accumulate as tension and anxiety. For the elite martial artist, however, practitioner of Xingyi, Taiji or Bagua, this sort of shallow, ragged breathing like that of a hunted animal simply won’t serve their purposes.
The “internal martial arts” all begin by relaxing and realigning the body, retraining it to operate as naturally and effortlessly as possible, as it once did in childhood. So there are “rules” or requirements that must be observed before “internal” practice can begin. I won’t list them here, as they are listed exhaustively in every book on the subject, but among the first of these requirements is relearning natural abdominal breathing. To do this, you must completely relax the belly and, by dropping it, use it as a plunger to suck air down into the lungs. The lungs will expand more fully, the bottom of the lungs (the least used part) will also fill, and now you have more chi. You’re breathing more effectively.
It’s important to note that this is not a “breathing technique” but the most natural and effortless way of breathing. Yet as we grew up, we’ve forgotten it. With natural diaphragmatic breathing, the breath will become slower and deeper, the chest won’t move as much, and anxiety will start to subside.
Finally, we can put it all together. What is “sinking the chi to the dantian”? It’s simply remembering, before you begin your practice, to relax and drop your lower belly as much as possible, relax the lumbar region in the back and allow your watery guts to rest comfortably in the pelvic basin, so that the breath will sink as deeply as possible into the abdomen. That’s it!
“Sink the chi to the dantian” = “Breathe from the lower abdomen”
We can now attempt a definition. The esoteric saying “Remember to sink the chi to the dantian,” which is lost in translation, can now be rephrased in English as “Remember to breathe from the lower abdomen by relaxing it and letting the breath go all the way down.” What could be simpler or more natural?
So there you have it — saying demystified. You are most welcome. Restore the Ming! _/|\_
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1 Red Pine (tr.), The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, North Point Press (1989), “Introduction,” x.