c. 470 BCE – c. 200 CE
Mohism
The school Mo Pai claims descent from: impartial care, siege engineering, optics, ghosts, an argument that the money spent on music would be better spent on the hungry — and no internal cultivation whatsoever.
Background
Background Topics
The history the timeline names in a line each: the school Mo Pai claims, the texts that came before it, the alchemy its vocabulary is actually borrowed from, and the century that shaped where it ended up.
c. 4th century BCE
The Neiye
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
The Xingqi Jade Inscription
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
The Mawangdui Daoyin Chart
Forty-four painted figures from a tomb sealed in 168 BCE: the oldest picture of the exercise tradition that becomes qigong.
142 CE
The Celestial Masters
The year Taoism became a religion with priests, parishes and a liturgy — and the apparatus Mo Pai claims none of.
c. 2nd century BCE – 10th century CE
Classical Alchemy
Before the elixir was internal it was a substance, made in a furnace out of cinnabar and lead — and the vocabulary Mo Pai uses is that laboratory's.
c. 700 – 1300 CE
The Rise of Neidan
Internal alchemy: where every technical term Mo Pai uses actually comes from, developed a thousand years after Mozi.
1170 CE onward
Quanzhen and the Dragon Gate
The monastic order built around internal alchemy — the institutional home of Mo Pai's methods, and everything Mo Pai does without.
1950s
How "Qigong" Was Invented
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 Chinese Communities of Java
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
The New Order
Mass killing in 1965, then three decades in which Chinese language, names and public practice were suppressed in Indonesia.
15th century – present
Wudang and Longmen Neigong
The living transmissions that teach the same internal material Mo Pai does — with temples, ordination, published curricula and named teachers behind them.
Myth; the system from the 2000s
Kunlun
A mythic mountain, and the name a modern Western-taught system borrowed from it — Mo Pai's closest rival for the same audience in the 2000s.
20th century – present
Nei Qi Gong and the Modern Lineages
The wider field of contemporary internal systems — some with real transmission, some assembled last decade — and the pattern that runs through them.
1979 – 1999
Qigong Fever
The Chinese mass movement of the 1980s and 90s — the environment the 1988 footage was broadcast into, and the crash that ended it.
c. 2nd – 5th century CE
The Cantong qi
The "Seal of the Unity of the Three": the founding text of Chinese alchemy, claimed by the laboratory and the meditation hall alike, and written so that both could.
c. 317 CE
Ge Hong and the Baopuzi
A fourth-century gentleman’s field report on the search for immortality — the elixirs, the teachers, the breathing, and the conviction that only the elixir actually works.
649 – 859 CE, and after
The Poisoned Emperors
Mercury, lead and arsenic in the imperial medicine cabinet: how many Tang rulers died of elixirs, what the historians said, and what the alchemists said back.
1668 – 1692 CE
The Secret of the Golden Flower
A seventeenth-century spirit-written meditation manual that became, through Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung, the first Taoist alchemical text most Westerners ever read.
1117 CE onward
The Eight Brocades
The most practised qigong set in the world: a twelfth-century name, a two-thousand-year family tree, a 2003 government standard, and a large, weak evidence base.
11th century CE onward
The Microcosmic Orbit
The small heavenly circuit: up the spine, down the front, through three gates — where the route comes from, how it reached English, and why the tradition warns against forcing it.
c. 168 BCE – 8th century CE
Embryonic Breathing
Breathing "as though in the womb": from holding the breath for a thousand heartbeats to circulating a breath that never enters the nose at all.
14th century – present
Mo Pai and the West
Where a Javanese Taoist method lands in a culture shaped by Christianity: the hesychast monks who prayed with the breath, the Church’s caution about warmth and light, Mesmer’s fluid, Jung’s alchemy and the Jedi.