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.

Baopuzi 抱朴子: Ge Hong's treatise of around 320 CE, and the fullest early account of Chinese alchemy in practice: ingredients, apparatus, the retreat into the mountains, and the insistence that none of the recipes work without oral instruction from a teacher.
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.
Cantong qi 參同契: The "Seal of the Unity of the Three", attributed to Wei Boyang and Han in origin. The founding text of Chinese alchemy, written obscurely enough that both the external and the internal traditions were able to read it as their own charter.
Cunsi 存思: "Maintaining and reflecting": the visualisation practices of medieval Taoism, in which deities and interior landscapes are held in the mind's eye. Mo Pai forbids the whole category — see the borderline state.
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.
Fei gong 非攻: "Against offensive war". The Mohist doctrine that an invasion is theft with worse arithmetic, and the direct application of jian ai to states rather than to persons.
He dao 合道: "Merging with the Tao". The terminus of the classical alchemical sequence, and where the corpus stops. Everything Mo Pai numbers above it has no classical counterpart.
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.
Huan gu 換骨: "Changing the bones". With marrow washing and sinew changing, one of the three body-refinement claims of the classical corpus: the skeletal frame said to alter in density as the refinement reaches deeper tissue.
Huandan 還丹: The "reverted elixir". Cinnabar heated gives up quicksilver, and quicksilver recombined with sulfur returns to cinnabar — a substance destroyed and restored, which is the operation classical alchemy was built around and the metaphor internal alchemy inherited.
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.
Huohou 火候: "Fire times", or fire phasing: how hot, how long, and in what sequence. In external alchemy this is the firing schedule of an actual furnace; in internal alchemy it is the regulation of breath and attention, and it is the most technically elaborate part of the literature.
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.
Jingluo 經絡: The channels and their branches — the network qi is said to move through. They have no anatomical referent and a very consistent functional one: a map of where sensation, referral and effect were observed to travel.
Jiu nian mian bi 九年面壁: "Nine years facing the wall". The canonical figure for the last stage of the work, borrowed from the Chan tradition. Like the ten months, it names a completeness rather than a count of days.
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).
Lian qi hua shen 煉氣化神: "Refining energy into spirit". The second of the three alchemical transformations, worked in the middle field, and the stage at which the yin shen appears — along with the standard error of mistaking it for the yang shen.
Lian shen huan xu 煉神還虛: "Refining spirit and returning it to emptiness". The third and last transformation. Nothing is added at this stage: the spirit body, the powers and finally the practitioner are let go of in turn.
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 jing 魔境: "Demonic states": the visions, voices and temptations the corpus treats as a predictable feature of the gestation stage rather than an interruption of it. The instruction is to neither believe them nor fight them.
Mo Pai 墨派: "The School of Mo". The lineage name, referring to Mo Tzu (Mozi).
Mojing 墨經: The "Mohist Canon" — the six dialectical chapters of the Mozi, containing definitions, a logic of names, and empirical propositions on levers, balances and mirrors, including a description of the camera obscura in the fourth century BCE.
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.
Mu yu 沐浴: "Bathing". The periods in the firing schedule when the fire is deliberately withdrawn and the work is left alone. Every commentary insists on them: an embryo attended to constantly is described as an embryo destroyed.
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.
Qigong re 氣功熱: "Qigong fever" — the mass movement in China from roughly 1979 to 1999: park practice by the tens of millions, celebrity masters, state-funded research into emitted qi, and an abrupt end after 1999.
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 nian bu ru 三年哺乳: "Three years of suckling". The period following the ten months of gestation, in which the emerged spirit body is treated as an infant — fed, kept close, and not allowed to go far.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shi yue huai tai 十月懷胎: "Ten months of gestation". The canonical span for carrying the immortal embryo, divided in the Zhong-Lü material into a schedule of advancing and withdrawing fire. Figurative in the way a pregnancy is figurative: a fixed sequence rather than a fixed calendar.
Tai xi 胎息: "Foetal breathing". Respiration said no longer to require the lungs — one of the oldest claims in Chinese religious practice.
Tuna 吐納: "Expelling and taking in": the old name for breath work — exhaling the stale and drawing in the fresh. One of the practices the twentieth century collected under the new word qigong.
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.
Waiqi 外氣: "External qi": qi said to be emitted from the body and to act at a distance. The specific claim Chinese research institutes attempted to measure during the qigong boom, and the one Mo Pai's level 4 makes.
Wei lu 尾閭: The first of the three spinal gates, at the coccyx.
Wen huo 文火: "Civil fire": the gentle, low, sustained heat of quiet attention. Paired with wu huo, and the setting the foundation is held with once it has been built.
Wu huo 武火: "Martial fire": forced breath and concentrated effort, the high setting of the alchemical fire. The foundation is built with it; the classical warning against leaving it on is the mechanism behind zou huo ru mo.
Wu lou 無漏: "Without outflow", the leakless state: the point at which the vessel no longer drains between sessions. Below it a practitioner is racing their own leakage; above it the store holds.
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.
Wuzhen pian 悟真篇: Zhang Boduan's verse classic of 1075, the central text of the Southern lineage of internal alchemy — and the sharpest classical source on the difference between the yin shen and the yang shen.
Xi sui 洗髓: "Washing the marrow". The claim that refined qi eventually reaches the deep tissue, and the name of a body-refinement literature whose surviving texts are late and whose attribution to Bodhidharma no historian accepts.
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.
Xingqi 行氣: "Circulating the qi". The oldest name for the practice, and the title given to the forty-five-character inscription cut into a twelve-sided piece of jade in the fourth century BCE.
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 qi 陽氣: The active, warm, rising pole of qi. It arrives with the breath and with food, and it is what ordinary practice accumulates. In Mo Pai it is one of the two halves the method gathers: level 3 fuses it with yin qi, and a practitioner who has gathered only this one has half the material the work requires.
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.
Yangsheng 養生: "Nourishing life": the broad Chinese tradition of health cultivation — diet, sleep, exercise, breath, emotional regulation — inside which most of these practices sat before anyone called them qigong.
Yi jin 易筋: "Changing the sinew". The connective-tissue counterpart of marrow washing, and the one classical body-refinement claim with an ordinary physiological reading available: tissue does remodel under sustained load, over years.
Yin qi 陰氣: The passive, heavy, drawing pole of qi. It does not come in with the breath: Mo Pai holds that it is absorbed upward from the earth through contact at hui yin, and only while the practitioner is deep in the sitting — which is the whole reason the method insists on bare ground. Level 1 gathers it; level 3 fuses it with yang qi. See The Ground.
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. The second half of the phrase is not a metaphor in the literature it comes from — see mo — and modern usage, which takes the whole term to mean something like a breakdown, has quietly dropped half of what it says.
Yaomo 妖魔: Malevolent spirits, in the sense the internal alchemy literature uses when it warns a practitioner. The claim made about them is specific: they feed on qi, they are drawn to a practitioner who is accumulating it, and they trouble the accumulator rather than waiting to be sought out. Distinguished in that literature from spirits in general, which are said to want qi but not to hound anyone for it.
Huli jing 狐狸精: The fox spirit of Chinese folklore, and — with the yaomo — the kind named most often in modern nei kung writing as troubling practitioners. The association is old and widespread in the popular literature: a being that takes what it wants from a person's vitality by attachment rather than by force.
Mo 魔: The demon of zou huo ru mo. In the classical alchemical sources the word carries its plain meaning as well as its figurative one: an interfering being, understood to arrive as the practitioner's accumulation grows. Whether a reader takes that literally or as the tradition's language for the mind turning on itself, it is what the texts say, and the warnings attached to it are given as instructions rather than as imagery.
Mo kao 魔考: "Testing by demons". The doctrine that obstruction arrives in proportion to progress — that the further a practitioner gets, the more they attract what would interrupt them, and that passing these trials is part of the path rather than a sign of having gone wrong. It is the frame in which the classical warnings about spirits are set: not an accident that may happen, but something expected.
De 德: Virtue, in the older sense of accumulated conduct that confers power rather than of moral reputation — the two meanings are the same word in the sources, and the alchemical texts trade on it. It is the remedy the classical literature gives for obstruction by mo: a practitioner with nothing accumulated behind them is held to be the one who runs into trouble. This is why the conduct rules in this tradition read like technical requirements rather than like advice.
Gui shen 鬼神: Ghosts and deities, taken together as a category. The received attitude towards them comes from the Analects — 敬鬼神而遠之, "respect ghosts and deities, and keep them at a distance" — which is also the practical instruction repeated in the nei kung literature: do not deal with them, and do not seek them out.
Zuowang 坐忘: "Sitting and forgetting". The Zhuangzi's term for a contemplative state in which the practitioner drops distinctions, body and self — the philosophical ancestor of the seated work, and much closer to Mo Pai's borderline state than any visualisation practice.