Tai Chi Journal

Tai Chi as Viagra?

Today I was feeling a litle tired after three straight days of doing Tai Chi exercises combined with lower back exercises, so I decided to do just a moderate set of Fundamental Movements, after spending a few minutes in the Wu Chi posture. This was my first morning of approaching Wu Chi according to my newfound understanding of how to get from my normal — i.e., highly idiosyncratic — posture into that standard beginning posture, as I previously reported here.

Basically, to make a long story short, I was asking my pelvis to roll back more than before.

I wasn't far into the set of exercises when I noticed that they were causing me to manifest spontaneously that which some men take Viagra for!

I was happy to note that the manifestation persisted as I continued to do the exercises, which I thought both wonderful and odd. Wonderful, because we men love manifestations of this sort when they happen to us ... especially those of us who are getting on in age. Odd, because the exercises send a lot of blood to various parts of the body. That would seem to militate against its remaining concentrated in any one stiffened part.

My interpretation of this is a tentative one: there really is a link between Tai Chi, the Wu Chi posture, and the flow of subtle energy in the body which the Chinese call qi or Chi.

Chi is akin to bioelectricity, or nerve energy, or blood energy, or what-have-you, depending on who you ask. But it is more than that. It is a category poorly understood in the West. It can't be reduced to a matter of electrical potential or blood. It can't be reduced to anything at all ... and Western science is hard put to explain phenomena that can't be analyzed reductively.

So the reason why I found my own self "hard put" this morning is not one that is easy for us Westerners to comprehend. We just have to take it on faith that Chi is behind anything at all, really, which happens in the body.


It occurs to me that I would like to know the Chinese for the male bodily manifestation we call an erection. It's . The first character is "bó," pronounced as it looks, and it means "sudden(ly)" or "quick(ly)." It can also mean "flourishing, prosperous." The second character is "qĭ," pronounced "CHI." Among other things, it means "rise" or "stand up."

Notice that I have shown the Pinyin transliterations of these two Chinese words with diacritical marks accenting the vowels. This is because Chinese uses up to four different tonal inflections for vowels, plus a fifth vowel pronunciation with no tonal inflection. The "acute" accent over the vowel in "bó" indicates a rising tone. As this is the so-called "second tone" in the list, another way to represent the word if diacritical marks are not available is "bo2," where the "2" indicates the second tone.

Likewise, "qĭ" has the accent we call a "breve." It indicates the "third tone" in the list: a falling and then rising tone. The alternative form is "qi3." This tonal accent distinguishes this particular word from "qì," the word (also pronounced "CHI") whose literal meaning is "vapor" or "steam" and which represents the bodily energy or vitality referred to in the name Tai Chi. The vowel in "qì" has a "grave" accent that indicates the "fourth," or falling, tone. The character for this word, whose alternate rendering is "qi4," is .

There is also a high, level, "first" tone indicated by the accent called a macron, as in "qī," which means "seven" and is drawn as . Without accent, it's "qi1." (The unaccented "qi5" is apparently an interjection which means "fie!")

posted by eric @ 11:38 AM