The classical background
Needham on Chinese alchemy as chemistry: the apparatus, the reactions, the poisonings, and the argument that this tradition is a real experimental science rather than a symbolic one. Enormous, expensive, and the reason the subject is taken seriously in the history of science at all.
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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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 standard scholarly account of Chinese alchemy before it turned inward: the Taiqing scriptures, the ingredients, the ritual around the furnace, and what the practitioners believed an elixir was for. Read it and the…
The founding text of Chinese alchemy, in a translation with the commentary a reader needs to survive it. Both the external and the internal traditions read the Cantong qi as their own charter, which tells you how much…
A historian of Chinese science on how alchemy and medicine actually appear in the written record — including in poetry and fiction, where most people met them. Useful for seeing the tradition as its own readers did…
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.
