Life
Jim McMillan is the second voice — an American who trained with Chang and afterwards wrote and taught about it, and the only substantial account of the same years that is not Danaos's.
His book, Seeking the Master of Mo Pai, describes the search, the acceptance and the training, and differs from the Danaos books in tone more than in substance: less framing, less physics, more of the ordinary texture of turning up in Java and being told to sit. Where the two accounts describe the same events they broadly agree, and where McMillan's portrait of Chang differs from the earlier one the difference is worth reading rather than reconciling.
One episode from his account has become part of the archive's standing advice. Left without his teacher for an extended period, he took up the microcosmic orbit on his own initiative from other reading; when Chang returned he was angry rather than corrective, judged that the mixing had undone the work, and sent McMillan back to the beginning. It is the origin of the do-not-mix rule set out in Safety.
The usual caution applies to him as to every source here, and he would probably not dispute it: two students of the same teacher agreeing with each other is corroboration of a kind, but it is not independent verification, and both accounts descend from the same handful of years in the same house.
