Mo PaiArchive

The Record

The Footage

Everything anyone has ever filmed of the Mo Pai claims, in one place. It amounts to about thirty minutes of 1988 television and the copies made of it.

This is the shortest page in the archive and that is the point of it. Twenty-five years of argument about Mo Pai have been conducted over one documentary segment, filmed by travellers who were not investigating anything, and later withdrawn at the subject's own request. No comparable footage has been produced since — not by Chang, not by his students, and not by anyone claiming the same abilities. Watch it before reading the arguments about it, and see The Demonstrations for what is actually visible in it.

The primary footage

Everything in this section is the same thirty minutes of 1988 television, in different copies. That is not a gap in this archive — it is the whole of the visual record.

The students

Footage of Chang's students rather than of Chang. It is later, it is filmed by and for the people in it, and nothing in it was recorded by an outsider who happened to be there — which is the quality that gives the 1988 material whatever weight it has.

Jim McMillan — Mo Pai Demonstration

Ken Brace · YouTube

The second Western student of Chang, demonstrating and talking about what he was taught. Not the 1988 footage and not a substitute for it: a student's account, filmed decades later, and to be weighed as one.

Discussed in The Western Transmission

From the archive's YouTube channel

Films and short animated guides made by this archive, shown here in the order they are meant to be watched, in the same voice as these pages: the history, the four levels the sources describe, how a sitting is set up, the breath, where the attention goes, the three dan tien and the 72 levels. They are illustrations of what the sources describe, not footage of anything, and they are kept apart from the record above for that reason.

The films

Longer narrated pieces: the history of the lineage and the footage, then the four levels the sources describe, each with its cautions.

  1. The lineage, the man, the footage

  2. Level 1 · Gathering the Yin

  3. Level 2 · Opening the Gates

  4. Level 3 · The Marriage of Yin and Yang

  5. Level 4 · Projection

How to practise

Twelve parts, in order: the sitting, the breath, the attention, and what goes wrong.

  1. Part 1The posture

  2. Part 2The ground

  3. Part 3The lock

  4. Part 4The breath

  5. Part 5Reverse breathing

  6. Part 6The attention

  7. Part 7The state

  8. Part 8Stillness

  9. Part 9The daily hour

  10. Part 10The 72-hour rule

  11. Part 11Beyond level one

  12. Part 12What goes wrong

The dan tien

The three fields, the circuit between them, and the lower field the practice starts from.

  1. Part 1Three fields

  2. Part 2The small circulation

  3. Part 3The lower field

The 72 levels

What is actually known about the ladder, and how little of it.

  1. The 72 levels

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