Almost everything the world knows about John Chang comes from people who admired him. This is the central problem of his biography and there is no solving it — there is no neutral account, no institutional record, no independent investigation. What exists is a documentary segment, two books by a student, a scattering of further student memoirs and forum testimony, and a very large volume of internet argument. The name "John Chang" is itself a convenience; sources differ on his actual name, and he took considerable trouble to keep it that way.
Before the cameras
The consistent outline: born in Java, Indonesia, into the Chinese-Indonesian community, some time around 1940. Trained from his teens or twenties under a teacher usually rendered as Liao Sifu — a Chinese immigrant said to have carried the Mo Pai transmission to Java. Chang became, in the lineage's counting, the fourth-generation inheritor of that line in its modern form.
The context matters enormously and is usually skipped. Chinese-Indonesians in the mid-twentieth century were a repeatedly persecuted minority. The anti-communist mass killings of 1965–66 fell heavily on ethnic Chinese communities; Chinese language, script, names, and cultural expression were suppressed under Suharto's New Order for three decades. A Chinese religious lineage in Java in that period was not being coy for effect. Secrecy was a survival adaptation, and it is worth holding that in mind when reading Chang's later, sometimes frantic, insistence on anonymity.
By the time Westerners met him, Chang was a middle-aged businessman — accounts describe a shop, a modest life, a family — who practised acupuncture and healing, and who taught a small number of students. He was not a monk, not a hermit, and not a professional guru. He appears in every first-hand description as an ordinary, funny, blunt, often irritable man who happened to be able to do something extraordinary.
Ring of Fire
In 1988 the brothers Lorne and Lawrence Blair released Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey, a documentary series for the BBC and PBS covering a decade of travel through the Indonesian archipelago. In one segment of the episode East of Krakatoa, they filmed a man they called "Dynamo Jack".
The footage is short and it is the single most-viewed piece of evidence in this entire subject. Chang shocks Lawrence Blair with a touch. He sets a sheet of newspaper alight, held at a distance, apparently by projecting heat. He performs healing work, including an acupuncture treatment on a Western patient using his hands rather than needles, and puts out a needle-less session on Blair's eye. He drives a chopstick through a table, in some tellings. He asks, on camera, not to be identified.
The segment made him famous in exactly the way he had asked not to be. He came to regard it as a catastrophe. In later years he asked the Blairs to withdraw the footage; subsequent releases of Ring of Fire have appeared without the Dynamo Jack segment, and Lawrence Blair has confirmed in interviews that this was at the subject's request. That request — a man with the most commercially valuable demonstration reel of its kind asking for it to be withdrawn — is one of the more striking facts of the whole affair, and it is entirely consistent with everything else recorded about how he regarded display.
Danaos and the books
In the 1990s, a Greek engineer named Kosta Danaos (who also writes as Kostas Dervenis) sought Chang out, was accepted as a student, and in 2000 published The Magus of Java: Teachings of an Authentic Taoist Immortal. A second book, Nei Kung: The Secret Teachings of the Warrior Sages, followed in 2002.
The Magus of Java is the reason anyone outside a few hundred people has heard of Mo Pai. It is also a strange book: part memoir, part hagiography, part earnest attempt at a physical theory of qi by a man with an engineering background, part transcription of conversations with Chang on subjects ranging from the mechanics of the dan tien to reincarnation, spirit mediumship, and the fate of the soul. It reads as sincere. It is also entirely uncorroborated, and its author had every incentive — emotional, if not financial — to present his teacher as extraordinary.
Chang did not authorise the book in any straightforward sense, and the relationship between the two men deteriorated afterward. Accounts of why differ by narrator and should be treated as contested.
The teaching years and the schism
After the books, Chang faced a problem he had spent his life avoiding: a global audience of people who wanted what he had. Some number of Westerners travelled to Indonesia. A very small number were accepted. Jim McMillan, an American, trained with him and later wrote and taught about the experience. Others came, sat, and were sent home.
In the late 2000s and 2010s a more formal teaching arrangement appeared — organisations offering instruction in the early levels, with fees, seminars, and a public web presence. This was a genuine break with everything the tradition had said about itself, and it split the community. To some it was a lineage adapting to survive. To others it was the exact commercialisation Chang had warned against, conducted in his name. Accusations of misrepresentation flew in several directions at once, and the online Mo Pai world of that period is a difficult, acrimonious archive to read.
Character
The portrait that emerges across independent accounts is consistent enough to be worth stating, because it is at odds with what people expect.
- He was reluctant. Nearly every account has him refusing to demonstrate, complaining about demonstrating, or demonstrating briefly and then being unwell.
- He was not solemn. Visitors describe jokes, smoking, ordinary conversation, and impatience with reverence.
- He took healing seriously and showmanship not at all. His time went to patients.
- He was frightened of publicity, and events proved him right to be.
- He refused money in the accounts from the earlier period, and this is one of the more consistently reported details across otherwise hostile witnesses.
- He described himself as a long way from anything worth admiring. Level 4 of 72, by his own accounting, with the real work not yet begun.
Death and afterward
Reports of Chang's death circulated in the Mo Pai community in the latter 2010s. As with much else, there is no public record that settles the date, and the ambiguity has been filled with the usual mixture of rumour, insistence, and mysticism. What is not ambiguous is that the transmission he carried has not been publicly demonstrated by anyone since — no successor has produced anything comparable to the 1988 footage, and the tradition's claim now rests entirely on testimony about a man who is gone.