Qigong (or ch'i kung) refers to a wide variety of traditional cultivation practices that involve methods of accumulating, circulating, and working with qi, breathing or energy within the body. Qigong is practiced for health maintenance purposes, as a therapeutic intervention, as a medical profession, a spiritual path and/or component of Chinese martial arts.
The qi in qigong means air in Chinese, and, by extension, life force, dynamic energy or even cosmic breath. Gong means work applied to a discipline or the resultant level of skill, so qigong is thus breath work or energy work. The term was coined in the twentieth-century and its currency, Swami Deva Peter suggests, speaks of a cultural desire to separate cultivation from superstition, to secularize and preserve valuable aspects of traditional Chinese practices.

Attitudes toward the scientific basis for qigong vary markedly. Most Western medical practitioners and many practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as the Chinese government, view qigong as a set of breathing and movement exercises, with possible benefits to health through stress reduction and exercise. Others see qigong in more metaphysical terms, claiming that qi can be circulated through channels called meridians.