Well.  We get to go through this again.

On Thu, 15 Oct 1998, TJ Hamilton wrote:

Me finally shutting up and giving my shpiel:
Chi and Ki are different things. Aside from Chi( pronounced Che) being
japanese and Ki (pronounced Ke, both e's are long) being chinese, they
refer to completely different things.

Yet written with the same kanji. . . .

Chi (or Qi, as in Qi Qong or TaiQi/Taichi) is the Chinese form.
Ki is the Japanese form.

The KI/CHI kanji is kind of hard to define since it has a radical in it
for 'vapor' or something similar.

They are written the same. They are the same. Yet at the same time, they
mean so many different things, its pointless.

It all comes down to the philosophy that you learn relating to it.

Trying to translate anything asian becomes very frazzling, while many
things may not be entirely correct, they aren't wrong. It depends on the
context.

But ki/chi is written the same in chinese and japanese.

The one translation I have heard from this ML that _really_ threw me for a
loop was when someone apparently took bits and pieces that they heard and
lumped them together in a passing fair attempt to describe chi and ki.
What he/she basically said was that one was the power that came from
within (eg Mouko Takabisha) while the other came from the surroundings (eg
Hiryu Shouten Ha or Bakusai Tenketsu).  Needless to say, I immediately
went:  "Huh? Where did this come from?"

Now I am not flaming anyone for that.  As I said earlier, it was a passing
fair attempt to reconcile two words (from two countries) with the same
"over all" meaning that happened to come to this ML and got somewhat
mangled due to a "report of a report of a report" type scenario.  In fact,
after my initial reaction, I thought it was a good attempt.


Phuc Tram
http://CrystalTokyo.com/~songoku
songoku@CrystalTokyo.com
songoku@spu.edu