Ki Suryŏn and GiCheon in Korea: Immortality Practices as a Marginalised Religious Movement

Korean *ki suryŏn* (氣修練 training related to ki – “life energy”), also referred to as *sŏndo suryŏn* (仙道修練 learning the way of immortality) is a contemporary urban practice, which, similarly to Chinese *qigong* and Indian yoga, is reinvented in modernity on the basis of ancient Asian traditions. Despite been widely spread and popular across the population in South Korea, *ki suryŏn* is severely marginalized in Western academia. Extensive scholarship exists on such practices in China and Japan, however, similar phenomena in Korea have hardly been studied in European languages. Many of *ki suryŏn* practices are based on a Daoist view of the body, but the practitioners come from various religions persuasion, including Christians and Buddhists; the *ki suryŏn* leaders do not advertise *ki suryŏn* as a “religion”, and *ki suryŏn* is usually not included under the rubric of “Korean religions”.