Reference

Glossary of Mo Pai and Neidan Terms

The technical vocabulary — almost all of it borrowed from classical Taoist internal alchemy, which is itself a fact worth noticing.

Bi gu 辟穀: Literally "avoiding grain". The classical practice, and eventually claim, of no longer requiring ordinary food. Long attested in the Chinese record as a practice of advanced adepts.
Da zhou tian 大周天: The "great heavenly circulation" or macrocosmic orbit, extending the small circulation through the limbs and the whole body.
Dan tien 丹田: "Elixir field". Three centres are described: lower (below the navel, the seat of qi and the focus of Mo Pai levels 1–4), middle (chest, shen), upper (between the brows, spirit). Unqualified, it means the lower.
Dao / Tao 道: The way, path, or course. In the Daodejing, the unnameable source and pattern of everything, which cannot be captured by the word used for it. The root of both daojia (the philosophical tradition) and daojiao (the organised religion).
Daojia / daojiao 道家 / 道教: The "Tao school" and the "Tao teaching": the philosophical tradition of the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, and the organised religion with priesthood, liturgy and canon. English collapses both into "Taoism", which is the source of most Western confusion about what Taoism is.
Daoyin 導引: "Guiding and pulling". The classical movement-and-stretching tradition ancestral to modern qigong, depicted on a chart of forty-four exercises recovered from the Mawangdui tombs, sealed 168 BCE.
Daozang 道藏: The Taoist canon. The Ming edition of 1445 collects roughly fifteen hundred titles, including most of the surviving neidan literature.
De qi 得氣: The characteristic dull, spreading, aching sensation sought in acupuncture, taken as a sign the point has been engaged. Reported by patients in Chang's needleless treatments.
Hsien / xian 仙: An immortal or transcendent. The stated terminus of the Mo Pai path at level 72, and the goal of the wider Taoist alchemical tradition.
Hui yin 會陰: The perineal point, and by extension the perineal/anal lock held throughout Mo Pai sitting practice. Its stated function is sealing the vessel so accumulated qi does not drain.
Hun / po 魂 / 魄: The ethereal and corporeal souls. The hun is associated with the liver, with imagination and dreaming, and is said to survive the body; the po is associated with the lung, with instinct and sensation, and to disperse at death. Two of the five aspects of shen.
Jia ji 夾脊: The second of the three spinal gates, at the mid-back between the shoulder blades.
Jian ai 兼愛: "Impartial care" or "universal love". The central ethical doctrine of Mohism: care extended equally rather than in concentric circles of obligation.
Jing 精: Essence. The densest of the three treasures, associated with reproductive and constitutional vitality. Divided into pre-heaven jing, inherited and finite, and post-heaven jing, extracted from food and air. In Mo Pai it is the raw material converted into qi, which is why continence is a mechanical requirement rather than a moral one.
Juzi 鉅子: The title of the leader of the Mohist organisation — a disciplined, hierarchical body, not a loose school of philosophers.
Kan li 坎離: The trigrams Water and Fire. The kan-li operation is the fusion of yin and yang that constitutes Mo Pai level 3 and the central operation of classical internal alchemy.
Lian jing hua qi 煉精化氣: "Refining essence into energy". The first of the three alchemical transformations, classically allotted a hundred days and worked in the lower dan tien. Mo Pai's entire published curriculum — levels 1 to 4 — sits inside it. The two that follow are lian qi hua shen (煉氣化神) and lian shen huan xu (煉神還虛).
Ming men 命門: "The gate of life" or "gate of destiny". A point on the lower back between the kidneys, and in the medical tradition the seat of the body's inherited fire and the store of pre-heaven jing.
Mo Pai 墨派: "The School of Mo". The lineage name, referring to Mo Tzu (Mozi).
Mozi / Mo Tzu 墨子: Mo Di, c. 470–391 BCE. Philosopher, logician, military engineer, founder of Mohism, and the claimed origin of the lineage.
Nei kung / neigong 內功: "Internal work". Internal training as distinct from external physical conditioning (wai gong).
Neidan 內丹: Internal alchemy. The Taoist tradition of refining jing into qi, qi into shen, and shen into emptiness, using the body as the crucible. Mo Pai's technical vocabulary is drawn almost entirely from it.
Neiye 內業: "Inward Training". A chapter of the Guanzi, c. 4th century BCE, and the earliest surviving Chinese text describing the cultivation of qi through posture, breath and stillness. Everything in this archive is downstream of it.
Qi 氣: The animating breath, vapour, or pervasion of Chinese thought. "Energy" is a lossy translation that imports physical commitments the original does not carry. Written ch'i in Wade-Giles, hence the English "chi"; ki in Japanese, gi in Korean.
Qigong 氣功: "Qi work". A twentieth-century umbrella term, popularised in 1950s China, for the older body of breathing, movement and meditation practices — daoyin, tuna, xingqi, yangsheng. Mo Pai and qigong are cousins descended from that material rather than parent and child.
Quanzhen 全真: "Complete Perfection". The monastic, celibate Taoist order founded by Wang Chongyang in the twelfth century, whose emphasis on internal alchemy makes it the closest institutional relative of Mo Pai's methods. Its Longmen (龍門) branch is the one most often named in discussions of neigong.
San bao 三寶: The "three treasures": jing, qi and shen — essence, energy and spirit, the organising triad of internal practice. The same phrase names two other sets, the Daodejing's ethical triad and religious Taoism's Tao, scripture and teacher, and only context distinguishes them.
San tiao 三調: The "three regulations" that define qigong practice: regulating the body (tiao shen), the breath (tiao xi), and the mind (tiao xin). Mo Pai is a maximal specification of all three, plus a fourth requirement — sealing.
Sheng tai 聖胎: The "holy embryo" or immortal foetus: the subtle body gestated in the dan tien over a long alchemical period, precursor to the shen bodies.
Shen 神: Spirit. The third and subtlest of the three treasures, refined from qi. The word covers gods, consciousness, and the visible presence of a person — the quality read off the eyes, which Chinese medicine treats as a diagnostic sign rather than a figure of speech.
Shi jie 尸解: "Liberation by means of a corpse". The classical account of an immortal's departure, in which the body left behind proves to be a garment, a staff, or a sword.
Tai xi 胎息: "Foetal breathing". Respiration said no longer to require the lungs — one of the oldest claims in Chinese religious practice.
Waidan 外丹: External alchemy: elixirs of cinnabar, mercury and lead compounded in a laboratory. It ran for centuries, poisoned several Tang emperors, and its failure is one of the forces that produced internal alchemy.
Wei lu 尾閭: The first of the three spinal gates, at the coccyx.
Wu wei 無為: "Non-action": acting without forcing, in accordance with how things already are. A central Taoist value, and an interesting counterpoint to a method as effortful as Mo Pai's.
Xiao zhou tian 小周天: The "small heavenly circulation" or microcosmic orbit: up the spine via the du mai, over the crown, down the front via the ren mai. Completing it is Mo Pai level 2.
Xing ming shuang xiu 性命雙修: "Dual cultivation of nature and life". The neidan principle that psychological-spiritual work and physiological work must proceed together; the northern and southern schools disagreed mainly over which to begin with.
Xu 虛: Emptiness. The terminus of the refinement sequence — spirit returned to emptiness, and emptiness merged with the Tao. Not a fourth treasure but the absence of the distinctions the other three are made of.
Yang shen 陽神: The yang spirit body: conscious, able to act on matter, visible to others, and surviving physical death. The goal of the alchemical work, and far above the levels Chang described himself as holding.
Yin shen 陰神: The yin spirit body: able to travel and perceive but not to act on matter, and not surviving death as a conscious individual. Confusing it with the yang shen is the error the literature warns about most sharply.
Yu zhen 玉枕: "Jade pillow". The third spinal gate, at the base of the skull — traditionally the hardest to open.
Yuanfen 緣分: Predestined affinity; the fated connection that brings people together. Mo Pai's stated criterion for who may be taught, and the reason there is no application process.
Zhen ren 真人: The "true" or "perfected" person of the Zhuangzi — a conception of the realised human that predates the alchemical literature by centuries.
Zhu ji 築基: "Building the foundation". The preliminary stage of internal alchemy, in which essence is refined into qi and the lower dan tien is filled before anything subtler is attempted. Classically allotted a hundred days, and the stage the classical literature is most emphatic cannot be skipped.
Zou huo ru mo 走火入魔: "Fire runs wild, the demon enters". The classical term for internal practice going wrong: rising heat that will not descend, agitation, insomnia, and in severe descriptions lasting psychological disturbance.