The classical background
The best short scholarly introduction to neidan. Pregadio is a historian of religion rather than a practitioner, which is exactly why he is useful here: he describes what the tradition says without needing it to be true.
The old standard English translation of a neidan manual. Read it beside the Mo Pai level descriptions and the borrowing is obvious: the gates, the circulations, the embryo, the spirit body, in the same order.
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One of the central texts of internal alchemy, with commentary. The kan-li operation that Mo Pai calls level 3 is this literature's central concern.
A scholar who was also an ordained Taoist priest, writing on how the body is conceived in Taoist practice. The best correction to the assumption that qi talk is a clumsy attempt at physics.
The biography of Wang Liping, a modern Longmen inheritor. Structurally the closest thing in print to The Magus of Java — a hidden lineage, a living master, extraordinary claims, one devoted chronicler.
A modern Chinese master's systematic summary of the neidan process, stage by stage. The clearest published statement of the three refinements that Mo Pai's levels enumerate.
The Shangqing visionary tradition in scholarly detail — the interior practice that fed into internal alchemy, several centuries before anything called neidan existed.
A short neidan classic on circulating the light and gestating the spirit body. Read this translation rather than the famous Wilhelm–Jung one, which worked from a defective text and a psychological reading of it.
