Shorinji Kempo and Qi Gong
Andy,
Great question. First off, I am not formally a student of Qi Gong, but I do have some experience with it as I am currently studying Oriental Medicine in the United States.
Part of the problem with answering your question is that Qi-Gong is at least a couple of thousand years old and probably has almost as many variations and branches. Types of Qi-gong range from completely motionless to completely kinesthetic types and from purely medical forms to martial arts varieties. I have spent some time talking with colleagues that study different types.
The unifying factor among all forms of Qi-gong is the use of breath to harness or move the QI. How, where and why this is done will depend on the type of the qi-gong you are doing.
The three benefits of Shorinji Kempo are self defense, mental health and physical health. We teach students to use a very specific breathing pattern which takes 25 to 30 seconds to complete each cycle. When done with the proper posture, mental state and breathing pattern the mind calms and clears, the Qi moves correctly and gathers in the areas necessary to defend yourself. After comparing Shorinji Kempo's breathing exercises with others who formally practice different types of qi-gong, I don't have a problem telling people that an element of Shorinji Kempo includes a qi-gong aspect to it. Whether or not it is formally qi-gong or not is really not as important to me, since it seems to me to provide a functionally many of the same benefits, specifically tailored for the three goals of our art.
You made mention to the Chinese obsession of separating martial arts into internal (yin) styles and external (yang) styles. One hallmark of Shorinji Kempo is that it is neither purely an internal or external form. But rather we teach both, separately at first, and over time students learn how to integrate the hard and the soft.
The website you linked also equates "internal" aspects of an art with zen. In this context, Shorinji Kempo is very internal as we see Shorinji Kempo as the physical method of training to learn a philosophy that Do Shin So called Kongo Zen. I know that this may sound circular, but the method of teaching self defense is through zen practice rather than simply to memorize a buch of blocks and kicks.
Needless to say there is much more that we could talk about, but I wonder how many people read the really long posts anyway. 8 ^ )
Thanks again for the nice question.
Last edited by dtoone; 16th April 2004 at 07:15.
David Toone
World Shorinji Kempo Emeryville Branch
Emeryville, California, USA