Dominion · 御 · yu
Level 57: The Company of Immortals
Contact with those who have already ascended.
Description
Contact with those who have already ascended. Chang's reported mediumistic contacts sit loosely here.
This entry is a reconstruction. Mo Pai publishes no curriculum for level 57, so what appears above is drawn from the classical stage this band corresponds to — the by-products the corpus calls the lesser attainments — and from the shape the Mo Pai literature implies for the "Dominion" band. It is a map of the territory that tradition describes, written by this archive and not taken from the lineage.
Practice
- Reconstructed, and with a caveat the corpus itself supplies: there is no method here. The abilities catalogued in this band are described everywhere in the literature as consequences of the work rather than objects of it, and no serious text gives instructions for acquiring one.
- What the literature does prescribe at this stage is restraint — that the capacities be neither used for gain nor demonstrated for belief, on the stated grounds that both re-attach a practitioner to exactly what the refinement has been dissolving.
Signs and effects
- Chang's reported mediumistic contacts sit loosely here.
How it is tested
Not published. Teacher-verified, as at every level below — and unverifiable here in a second sense, since the classical account below is not Mo Pai's.
Obstacles
- The powers themselves. This is the most consistent warning in the entire tradition, from the Zhuangzi to the Longmen commentaries: the attainments are a trap, and the more impressive they are the more reliably they end the work.
- Being known. The classical biographies are full of adepts who withdrew after a demonstration, and the tradition reads their withdrawal as the correct response rather than as modesty.
- Teaching too early. An adept who begins transmitting at this stage is described as having exchanged their own completion for a lineage.
Sources for this entry
- 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.
- The Zhong-Lü corpus — The Tang–Song material attributed to Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin: the first systematic step-by-step internal method, and the source of the ten months, the three years and the nine years.
- The Baopuzi and the early alchemical record — Ge Hong, c. 320 CE, and the Great Clarity scriptures after him: the fullest early accounts of what Chinese alchemists actually did, before the work turned inward.
- Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.