Background Topics

c. 470 BCE – c. 200 CE

Mohism

The school Mo Pai claims descent from: impartial care, siege engineering, optics, and no internal cultivation whatsoever.

c. 4th century BCE

The oldest surviving Chinese text on cultivating qi — four centuries before alchemy, and startlingly close to what Mo Pai asks a beginner to do.

c. 4th century BCE

Forty-five characters cut into a twelve-sided piece of jade, describing the circulation of breath — the earliest physical evidence of the practice.

168 BCE

Forty-four painted figures from a tomb sealed in 168 BCE: the oldest picture of the exercise tradition that becomes qigong.

142 CE

The year Taoism became a religion with priests, parishes and a liturgy — and the apparatus Mo Pai claims none of.

c. 700 – 1300 CE

Internal alchemy: where every technical term Mo Pai uses actually comes from, developed a thousand years after Mozi.

1170 CE onward

The monastic order built around internal alchemy — the institutional home of Mo Pai's methods, and everything Mo Pai does without.

1950s

A 1950s hospital coinage that let a religious practice continue as physiotherapy — and the word Mo Pai pointedly does not use.

15th century onward

The diaspora the lineage is said to have travelled with: centuries of settlement, its temples, and its habit of keeping things inside the community.

1965 – 1998

Mass killing in 1965, then three decades in which Chinese language, names and public practice were suppressed in Indonesia.

1979 – 1999

The Chinese mass movement of the 1980s and 90s — the environment the 1988 footage was broadcast into, and the crash that ended it.