Life
Zhang Boduan spent most of his life as a minor official and came to alchemy late, by his own account after a meeting with a teacher in Chengdu in 1069. The Wuzhen pian, "Awakening to Reality", followed in 1075: eighty-one poems in the compressed, allusive register the tradition prefers, plus commentary that generations of readers have needed.
He is the founder of what later became the Southern lineage, distinguished from the Northern by starting with ming — the physiological work — rather than with xing, the work on nature. Mo Pai, which begins by filling the lower field and says nothing about mind training until much later, is on the Southern side of that argument without ever having heard the argument.
His most quoted lines here are the ones about the spirit bodies. A practitioner who has produced something that can travel and perceive but cannot act has produced the yin shen, and Zhang Boduan is unambiguous that this is a dead end mistaken for an arrival — a warning that applies directly to Mo Pai's levels 13 to 24.
