Mo PaiArchive

Biography

Wang Liping

Longmen lineage holder · b. 1949

An archive plate: a gateway with a red line rising through the arch and out of it.
An archive plate. The Dragon Gate is a gate in the literal sense — the branch is named for the carp that leaps it — and no freely licensed photograph of its living holders exists. Mo Pai Archive · Drawn for this archive

A living holder of the Dragon Gate lineage, trained from boyhood by three elderly monks, and the subject of the one book in English that sets out a documented internal curriculum in the detail Mo Pai never publishes.

Life

Wang Liping was born in Liaoning in 1949 and, on the account given in Opening the Dragon Gate, was taken in hand as a boy by three elderly Longmen monks and trained through the Cultural Revolution in conditions that make the training itself remarkable. He has taught publicly since the 1980s.

The book is why he appears here. It describes a curriculum — seated work, retreat, staged inner alchemy — with enough specificity that a reader of this archive will recognise the fields, the gates and the three refinements, and it does so under a named lineage with a living teacher who can be found. That combination is exactly what Mo Pai does not offer.

The comparison cuts both ways, and this archive states both. His claims are far more modest than Chang's: no demonstration on film, no measurable charge, nothing that would settle anything. What he has instead is a documented transmission and a public curriculum — and which of those a reader finds more persuasive is the argument the whole subject turns on.

Their book

Everything this archive says about them rests on these — see Sources.

Elsewhere in the archive