Biography

People of the Mo Pai Story

Six figures, one of them solidly historical, one of them filmed once, and the rest known only through the accounts of people who admired them.

John Chang

Fourth-generation Mo Pai inheritor (claimed) · c. 1940 – late 2010s

The central figure. An Indonesian Chinese-Javanese businessman, acupuncturist, and healer who became, entirely against his own wishes, the most famous internal-energy practitioner of the twentieth century. Described consistently as ordinary, blunt, funny, reluctant, and deflationary about his own attainment — level 4 of 72, by his own accounting. "John Chang" is a convenience; he took care that his real name and location stayed obscure.

Liao Sifu

Chang's teacher; third-generation inheritor (claimed) · Unknown

A Chinese immigrant in Java said to have carried the transmission and taught Chang. Almost nothing is known of him beyond his students' accounts. He is described as having forbidden transmission outside the Chinese community — a prohibition Chang broke — and as having been surpassed by his own student.

Kosta Danaos (Kostas Dervenis)

Student; author of the founding Western texts · Contemporary

A Greek engineer who sought Chang out in the 1990s, was accepted, and wrote The Magus of Java (2000) and Nei Kung (2002) — the books that made Mo Pai a subject of Western interest at all. Nearly everything the world knows about the level structure, the biography and the demonstrations traces back to his account of his own apprenticeship. Has published later work under the name Kostas Dervenis.

Jim McMillan

Student · Contemporary

An American student who trained with Chang and subsequently wrote and taught about the experience, providing a second inside perspective on the same period. Students of the same teacher agreeing with each other is not independent corroboration, but it is not nothing either.

Lorne and Lawrence Blair

Documentary filmmakers · Ring of Fire, 1988

Made the decade-spanning Indonesian documentary series that contains the Dynamo Jack segment. Not paranormal investigators — which is exactly why the footage carries the credibility it does, and exactly why it establishes less than people assume. Lawrence Blair has discussed the encounter in later interviews and has not recanted. They removed the segment at Chang's request.

Mozi (Mo Di)

Claimed founder · c. 470 – c. 391 BCE

A genuine and major historical figure: philosopher of impartial care, pioneer of Chinese logic and optics, and leader of a disciplined corps of military engineers who specialised in making cities too expensive to besiege. That he existed and led a martially capable organisation is solid history. That his school practised internal energy cultivation is unsupported by anything in the Mohist canon.