Sources and Bibliography

Source keys used on level entries

• magus The Magus of Java — Kosta Danaos, Inner Traditions, 2000. The founding Western text.
• neikung Nei Kung: The Secret Teachings of the Warrior Sages — Kosta Danaos, Inner Traditions, 2002.
• ringoffire Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey — Lorne and Lawrence Blair, 1988. The "Dynamo Jack" segment, later withdrawn at the subject's request.
• leaked The leaked level 1–4 instruction sheets — Circulated on internet forums from the mid-2000s, and the basis of most unsupervised practice since.
• forums Community testimony — Forum archives, student accounts, and interviews from the 2000s–2010s.
• mcmillan Jim McMillan's accounts — Writing and teaching by a second Western student of Chang.
• neidan The classical neidan corpus — Zhong-Lü texts, Wuzhen pian, Longmen commentaries, and the wider internal alchemy literature — the actual technical parent of Mo Pai's methods.
• numerology Chinese numerological and literary tradition — The 36/72 pairing, the seventy-two transformations, the seventy-two disciples — the cultural source of the number.
• editorial Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.

Bibliography

• The Magus of Java: Teachings of an Authentic Taoist Immortal — Kosta Danaos, 2000.
  The primary source for essentially everything on this site.
• Nei Kung: The Secret Teachings of the Warrior Sages — Kosta Danaos, 2002.
  More technical; broader context on internal martial practice.
• Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey — Lorne & Lawrence Blair, 1988.
  Documentary series. The Dynamo Jack segment appears in original releases only.
• The Mozi (墨子) — Mohist school, c. 4th–3rd c. BCE.
  The Mohist canon: ethics, logic, optics, mechanics, and siege defence.
• Huangdi Neijing Suwen (黃帝內經素問) — Compiled, Han dynasty, c. 2nd c. BCE – 2nd c. CE.
  The foundational medical classic. Its opening chapter sets out the schedule of jing across a life in cycles of seven and eight, and it is the source for most of what The Three Treasures: Jing, Qi, Shen describes.
• The Taoist Body — Kristofer Schipper, 1993.
  Serious scholarship on Taoist practice and cosmology, and the best way to see any single lineage in its wider context.
• Original Tao: Inward Training and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism — Harold D. Roth, 1999.
  Translation and study of the Neiye — the earliest text on cultivating qi, and the root of everything on this site.
• Daoism Handbook — Livia Kohn (ed.), 2000.
  The standard survey of the tradition's history, schools, texts and practices. The place to check anything in Taoism, and Where Mo Pai Sits in It.
• Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–63 — Kim Taylor, 2005.
  How traditional practice was reorganised as state medicine — the context in which the word "qigong" was invented.
• Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China — David A. Palmer, 2007.
  The definitive account of the 1980s–90s qigong boom, the external-qi research programme, and the 1999 crackdown.
• A close look at therapeutic touch — Rosa, Rosa, Sarner & Barrett (JAMA), 1998.
  The best-known controlled test of a practitioner's claimed ability to detect a human energy field. Relevant to Qi: The Word Everything Rests On.
• Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity — Isabelle Robinet, 1993.
  Rigorous academic treatment of the meditative traditions underlying the alchemical corpus.
• The Encyclopedia of Taoism — Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.), 2008.
  The standard reference. Entries on neidan, dan tien, yang shen, shi jie, and everything else in the glossary here.
• Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin — Livia Kohn, 2008.
  The historical development of the practices, with the scholarship attached.
• The Cambridge History of Ancient China — Loewe & Shaughnessy (eds.), 1999.
  For the historical Mohists and their place in the Warring States period.
• Varieties of contemplative experience — Lindahl, Fisher, Cooper, Rosen & Britton (PLoS ONE), 2017.
  The modern literature on adverse effects of intensive meditation practice. Relevant to Safety and not otherwise easy to find.

The annotated reading list →

How to read the source keys