The Magus of Java (Kosta Danaos, 2000)
Subtitled Teachings of an Authentic Taoist Immortal, and published by Inner Traditions. It is the foundation document of everything the West knows about Mo Pai, and it is a genuinely odd book — a memoir of apprenticeship, a hagiography, an attempt at physical theorising by an engineer, a set of transcribed conversations with a man in trance, and a polemic about the imminent loss of a tradition, all in one volume.
Its strengths: it is specific where it could have been vague, it names practices, it records Chang's own words at length including the unflattering ones, and it does not pretend the author is anything other than a partisan. Its weaknesses: it is entirely uncorroborated, its physics is not good, its rhetorical mode is devotional, and it has the structural problem of every apprenticeship memoir — the author's entire framework for evaluating the claims was supplied by the person making them.
Nei Kung: The Secret Teachings of the Warrior Sages (Kosta Danaos, 2002)
The follow-up, and a more technical book. It places Mo Pai in a wider context of internal martial practice, expands on the theoretical material, and addresses the martial dimension of the tradition more directly than the first book does. It is also, in places, a response to the reception of The Magus of Java.
The author has since published under the name Kostas Dervenis, including work on Greek martial traditions and on pankration, and his later positions on some of this material have shifted. Readers tracking the primary sources should be aware that the author of 2000 and the author of later decades are not making identical claims.
The leaked instruction sheets
At some point in the 2000s, documents purporting to be the actual level 1–4 instructions circulated on internet forums. Their provenance has never been established. They are internally consistent with the books, they are specific about posture, lock, breath, and attention, and they are the basis of essentially all unsupervised Mo Pai practice worldwide.
Three cautions about them. They may not be authentic. If authentic, they are certainly incomplete — the yang-drawing method at level 3 in particular is conspicuously thin. And the tradition's own position is that the documents are not the method: without a teacher to verify, a practitioner following them has no way to distinguish accumulation from imagination, which is the exact failure the forum era went on to demonstrate at scale.
Jim McMillan and other student accounts
Jim McMillan, an American student, has written and taught about training with Chang, offering an independent perspective on the same period. Further material exists in scattered forum testimony, interviews, and self-published accounts of varying quality. All of it is inside-the-tent, and none of it is corroborating in the strict sense — students of the same teacher agreeing with each other is not independent verification.
