What is the Biofield?
The biofield is a hypothesized field of subtle energy said to surround and permeate the living body. The word itself is recent. It was coined in 1992 at the United States Office of Alternative Medicine to give a single name to a much older idea: that a person is animated by a vital energy. The term gathers together Chinese qi, Indian *prāṇa*, Japanese ki, and the etheric energy of Western esotericism. This field has not been detected by any reproducible measurement, and mainstream science treats its existence as unproven.
Biofield vs aura, prana, chakras
These terms overlap and are often used loosely. *Prāṇa* is the specific Indian name for vital energy. The biofield is a modern umbrella word that prāṇa sits under, along with qi and ki. The aura is usually described as the visible or sensed glow of the biofield, its outer layer. The chakras are described as centres within the field where energy is said to gather, not the field itself. The subtle body is the wider map of channels and sheaths of which the biofield is the energetic aspect. In short, the biofield is the field, prāṇa is one tradition's name for it, and aura, chakras and the subtle body are features attributed to it.
Where the term comes from
Unlike qi or prāṇa, which are thousands of years old, biofield is a coined English word. A group convened at the US National Institutes of Health agreed on it in 1992, looking for neutral, scientific-sounding language for therapies that assume a vital energy. The later National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine split energy therapies into two classes. Veritable energies are measurable, such as electromagnetic fields and sound. Putative energies, the biofield among them, are those that have so far defied measurement by reproducible methods. The word therefore carries an ambiguity from birth. It is sometimes used for the body's real, measurable electrical activity, and sometimes for the unmeasured energy of the healing traditions.
What the traditions describe
Long before the word existed, most contemplative cultures described something like it. Chinese medicine works with qi, said to flow through channels called meridians. In yoga and Ayurveda, *prāṇa* flows through channels called nāḍīs and concentrates at the chakras. Prāṇāyāma, the yogic regulation of breath, is described as a way to direct it. The kośa model places a sheath made of prāṇa between the physical body and the mind, and the kundalini tradition maps a coiled energy said to rise through the subtle body. Reiki speaks of ki. Western esoteric writers of the nineteenth century spoke of an etheric body and an odic force. These systems disagree on the details. They share the basic claim that a person is more than the visible flesh, and that this energy can be cultivated, blocked, or restored.
The scientific status
Whether the biofield exists is openly contested, and it is not this entry's place to settle it. No instrument has measured a putative biofield in a way that other researchers can reliably repeat. Reviews of biofield therapies report mixed and generally weak evidence, and many scientists classify the concept as pseudoscience. Practitioners counter that the effects are real even where the mechanism is not understood. The careful position is that the measurable electrical and magnetic fields of the body are well established, while the subtle energy of the healing traditions remains unproven. Everything described here is what the traditions and practitioners claim. Nothing in this entry is medical advice or a statement that any therapy treats any condition.
Where it sits in the index
The biofield is the connective idea behind a large cluster of the index's energy material. It is the field that prāṇa names, that the chakras organise, that prāṇāyāma is said to move, and that the subtle body, kośa and kundalini traditions map in detail. Reading those entries alongside this one shows how a single modern umbrella word came to cover ideas that grew up separately across India, China, Japan and the esoteric West.