the healing spiral >> tai ji >> three treasures

how do you write Chinese words in English?

There are three systems for transliterating Chinese words into English: Wade-Giles, Yale, and Pinyin.

They are quite different, and I've written an article explaining about them here.

the three treasures

The Taoists speak of three treasures: qì, jīng, and shén.

汽 qì / ch' i / chi, nowadays written in English as chi, shows steam rising from a bowl of rice. It means steam or vapour, but also means subtle energy. There is no word for this in English, so we use the Chinese term chi. It is very close to the Hindu term prana or subtle breath.

精 Jīng / ching / jing is stored energy.

Jīng has two aspects. Pre-birth jīng is received from your parents through the sperm and egg. Since a whole human being springs forth from the conceptus, Taoists reasoned that the sperm and egg must contain an incredibly potent energy. It is this aspect of jing that is emphasised in its usual English translation, essence.

Men lose jing through ejaculation and women through menstruation, so Taoist texts stress the importance for men not to waste their sperm if they want to reach a high level of practice.

Pre-birth jing that is lost can never be replaced. However, we also absorb jing from food and air. This is called post-birth jing.

Strong jing then relates to having a strong body, which is necessary if we are to attain the third treasure, shén. Jing is not a goal in itself, but when the jing is exhausted, we die.

In the Chinese view, jing is stored in the kidneys.

神 The third treasure is shén / shen / shen. Shén is the intelligence that you can see in brightly shining eyes.

Shen is seen as the highest or most refined form of energy in the body. It is often translated into English as spirit, and relates also to consciousness. A major goal of Taoist practice is to transform qì into shén.

Chi, Jing and Shen in Western thought

In the West there are no direct equivalents for any of the three treasures.

However, the Judeo-Christian world view posits some similar ideas.

The Hebrew word ru'ach (ruha in Aramaic) means both breath, or wind, and spirit. In Greek this is pneuma (πνευμα), meaning breath, subtle breath, or spirit, and latin adopted the Greek word directly.

This is quite a similar idea to shén qì.

Once the bible was translated into vernacular languages such as English, pneuma was translated as "holy spirit" and the double meaning of the word was lost. This persists to the present day, when most people have no idea that the word spirit in the bible is the same word as breath.