Breath in Zen, qigong and other traditions

Early Buddhism: knowing that you breathe

The Anapanasati Sutta, one of the discourses of the Pali Canon, teaches mindfulness of breathing. Its first step is as simple as it is hard: breathing in long, know that you're breathing in long; breathing out short, know that you're breathing out short. Next comes training to breathe while sensing the whole body, and to breathe while calming it.

Nothing is forced. The same canon says that the Buddha, before his awakening, tried forcibly holding his breath and found it painful and of no use for what he was after. The Buddhist tradition starts from that experience: watch before you control.

Zen: to count or not to count

In Japan, the practice of counting the breath is called susokukan. Myoshinji, a temple of the Rinzai school, presents it as the usual method for beginners: count each exhalation from one to ten, then return to one. If you lose count, you go back to one. The exhale is long and relaxed, and the breath flows from the tanden, the lower abdomen.

The Soto school teaches something else. Its instructions say not to try to control your breathing: let long breaths be long and short breaths be short, until you forget you're breathing. They cite Dogen, the school's founder, for whom regulating the breath by counting belonged to another path, different from that of his teachers.

Taoism and qigong

In China, Taoist texts speak of taixi, embryonic breathing: breathing like a fetus in the womb, almost without using the nose or mouth. The oldest surviving reference describes an adept from around the year 200. In 318, Ge Hong laid out the method in his Baopuzi: breathe in through the nose, hold the air while counting 120 heartbeats, and let it out through the mouth.

Around the middle of the Tang dynasty (618-907) came a turn that the historians Henri Maspero and Joseph Needham consider decisive. Adepts stopped holding outside air and began guiding an inner breath with their attention. Needham suggests that the hazards of long breath holds, vertigo and fainting among them, helped bring about the change.

Today's qigong inherits that second way. The U.S. National Institutes of Health describe it as a practice developed in China, within its traditional medicine, that regulates the mind, the breath and the body's movement, with breathing that is slow, long and deep. The studies on it are generally small, with mixed results.

Hesychasm: the Jesus Prayer

In Eastern Christianity, hesychia means stillness. Hesychasm is the monastic tradition that seeks it through constant repetition of a short prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." Its roots lie with the monks of the Egyptian desert, and John Climacus was already recommending a one-phrase prayer.

In the 13th century, Nikephoros, a monk of Mount Athos, advised attaching the prayer to the breath, head bowed toward the chest, to gather the mind in the heart. Around 1337, the monk Barlaam of Calabria attacked the hesychasts. Gregory Palamas defended them, and the synods of Constantinople in 1341 and 1351 sided with him.

The tradition's texts were gathered in the Philokalia, published in Greek in Venice in 1782. The tradition itself treats the bodily technique as an aid, not the essence, teaches that the prayer of the heart is learned under a spiritual guide, and warns of the harm in forcing it on your own.

Sufism: remembrance in every breath

Dhikr means remembrance. It's the form of Islamic worship in which phrases or prayers are repeated in order to remember God, grounded in Quranic verses such as the one that asks believers to remember him often. It can be done aloud, alone or in a group, or silently, without moving the body.

The Naqshbandi order stresses silent dhikr. Among its eleven principles is hush dar dam, awareness in the breath: not breathing in or out in forgetfulness of God. The first eight are credited to Abdul Khaliq Ghijduwani, who died in 1179, and the other three to Baha-ud-Din Naqshband (1318-1389). The order's tradition attributes a line to the latter: the foundation of our work is in the breath.

Likenesses, differences and an open question

The likenesses are easy to see: a phrase or a count, a rhythm, attention gathered in the chest or the belly. The Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware suggested that hesychast techniques may have been influenced by Sufi dhikr, and dhikr in turn by Indian yoga. The reverse has also been proposed, that Sufis learned from early Christian monks. Nobody has proven it either way.

The differences weigh more. For a Zen monk, a hesychast or a Sufi, the breath isn't the point: it supports a prayer, or an attention turned toward something greater, within a whole life of practice. All of them teach with a guide and warn against improvising.

What you can try here

This site borrows just two simple exercises from those traditions, without their religious frame. Counting breaths (susokukan) guides 10 minutes of breathing in for 4 seconds, out for 6 and resting for 1, while you count each exhale from one to ten. Qigong abdominal breathing is 5 minutes of in for 6 and out for 6, with your attention below the navel. The seconds are this guide's, not a temple's.

If one of these traditions truly calls to you, the right move is to find a community and a teacher. A web page can show you an exercise. It can't hand down a tradition.