Mo Pai and the West
A short, rigorous map of the Western tradition of hidden knowledge — alchemy, magnetism, Theosophy, the New Age — by its leading historian. It explains the categories most Westerners use, without knowing it, to make sense of an Asian master with unexplained powers.
The volume with the hesychast texts: the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention, Nikephoros on attaching the prayer to the breath, Gregory of Sinai, and Palamas. The Christian literature that looks most like Mo Pai's…
A nineteenth-century Russian wanderer learns the Jesus Prayer from a starets and a battered copy of the Philokalia, and walks across Russia praying it with every breath. The most approachable account there is of a…
The defence of the hesychast monks against the charge that they were navel-gazers: the uncreated light, and the distinction between God's unknowable essence and his knowable energies. Where a Christian reader should…
How Taoism was read, misread and remade in Europe and America, from the first European translations to the counterculture. The book to read to see why Western readers meet Mo Pai already expecting something.
The first great European craze for a healing energy passed from one body to another, the royal commission that tested it, and why it survived the verdict. A two-century-old rehearsal of nearly every argument about qi.
Western seekers on a Taoist mountain, and the Chinese monks who host them: what each wants from the other, and why they so rarely get it. The clearest account of why a technique without a temple travels so well — and…
