Shifu Lin - Beginning Mo Pai Nei Kung (Third Expanded Edition)

Beginning Mo Pai Nei Kung

Presented by Lung Hu Shan Publications

Author: Shifu Lin

Editors: Arman Alfares, Shifu Hern Heng

1996-2012. All Rights Reserved.

Preface to the Third Edition

It has now been some time since I first offered to teach Westerners and non-Chinese the methods of Mo Pai Nei Kung, through the level of Yin Yang Kung, and indeed further should I learn further. I have made five texts for the purposes of assisting those who already practice Mo Pai, but who have encountered problems, and for those newcomers who desire to learn Nei Kung. The purpose of these offerings was to pass on knowledge which I believe has been incorrectly concealed. That does not mean that I disagree with withholding the teachings from those unworthy or because of that undesirable to traditional teachers. Indeed, it is easier to do as the current and former headmasters of the Mo Pai school in Indonesia are doing, and simply say no Westerners. There have been times when I have been tempted to follow suit, however, as it turns out, my most dedicated students are in some cases non-Chinese Westerners.

If Mo Pai were any other tradition and lineage than one based on the ethical teachings of Mozi (also transliterated as Mo Tzu), then I would acknowledge that they have the right to be left alone to discriminate against any segment of the worlds population. I would not approve of this discrimination, but I would not interfere with it. In fact, I do not believe that I am interfering now, but I do know that some in Indonesia, under the current headmaster, do see it that way. Instead, I believe my teaching is following more closely with the true spirit of Mo Pai, which is based on the egalitarian, meritocratic teachings of Mozi, who the lineage is named after, and claims origins from. I must defer to the founder of the school and his instructions before deferring to the current headmaster to whom the school was passed after Sifu John Chang. I say this with all due respect, and I hope that me following my ethical convictions will be understood and respected, even if there is disagreement. In the end, Heaven will determine progress. This is a system unlike many other systems in that regard. This is why Yin Yang Kung is so difficult a level to obtain. As greater quantities of energy are acquired, stored and finally merged, Heaven takes more notice. Those who struggle for many years to obtain Yin Yang Kung should understand this. Egalitarianism will be honored. Ethnic discrimination will not be.

With that said, and with my position on the matter articulated here, and much more completely in The Meritocratic Standards of Mozi: Why Nei Kung Cannot Be Limited Only to Chinese Students & Discussion On the Role of Karma in the First Four Levels of Mo Pai Nei Kung, I would like to emphasize something else regarding how I am implementing meritocratic discernment and discrimination, rather than racial discrimination, as the criterion for teaching Mo Pai Nei Kung. As you will see in the following pages, there is a $300 honorarium fee which I require for all new students. This is a one-time, non-reoccurring fee, and the fee is itself donated for the sake of others, not for me to get rich from, nor even to earn a living from. Since I began teaching Mo Pai more openly, I have only taught a relatively small number of students, not even two dozen. There is certainly no way that one could get rich from this, if that was indeed the goal. At the same time, students of some other teachers have taken it upon themselves to try to cause trouble for me, even while I was helping their own teachers in Mo Pai to get past their plateaus and pitfalls that caused their progress to stagnate for many years. They requested my help, and as you will see in Questions and Answers on Learning Mo Pai Nei Kung (Second Expanded Edition) , they described the help that I did give them as a God send. So why, dealing with all of these annoyances, would I do this if it were for a quick buck? The logical answer is that I wouldnt; it is simply not worth the time or effort for such a small amount of money. This should serve to reason to anyone intelligent that my motives lie elsewhere than the bank. But this is, sadly, the way that Westerners, and Americans in particular, often think. The jaded cynicism of Western decadence causes them to think that anyone out there offering something must be trying to deal dishonestly with them, or must be trying to make a profit at their expense. Why is this? Is it just because there is so much deception in the West? Yes and no. It is also because the way we see others is often more telling of who we are than it is tell of who the other is. A positive person will look at the positive traits of a person before they will search out the negative. But a negative person will see faults and flaws even in the most righteous and honorable man. It is not for me to speak about myself in this book, or any other. I make it very clear that these books are about Mo Pai Nei Kung and not about Shifu Lin or about my relationship to John Chang. That is a different type of book, and while it seems popular with Westerners to read such anecdotal tales, it does not interest me to write a book of that sort on Mo Pai. If you like adventurous stories like that, Kostas Danaos has written two very interesting books about his journey to meet my teacher and his former teacher. I enjoyed reading them very much, even if they do not always correspond to what I was told by my teacher. His book is his book and my books are my books. They are very different from one another. His is about his journey to learn Mo Pai which he will not teach and no longer practices. My books are about how you can learn Mo Pai, why you should be taught Mo Pai regardless of race , and how to overcome common problems and pitfalls associated with the practice.

So how do I judge who is fit to learn and who to reject? This is simply too difficult a decision to be left up to me. So for this reason I have left the decision in the hands of Heaven. In the East, prospective students will work very hard for many years to learn a system. They will practice day in and day out, they will clean their teachers house, they will do chores, run errands, run a Kung Fu school and so on. They will do all of this without being compensated. In the West, people look at this as slavery. They will then be slaves for their teacher. In the West, however, people love money very much. Everything is about money: how much is this, how much is that? You teach this system, how much to learn it? Everything is quantified in terms of Western valuations of dollars and cents. This is how the Western mindset emerges. Youths want to learn Mo Pai, however, and they think this better not cost me money? Why? Because when many teachers learned from John Chang, money did not change hands. Of course, it costs a lot of money to travel to Indonesia, but when he taught, he did not quantify Mo Pai methods in terms of dollars and cents, because if he did, who could have afforded such teachings? He was told instead that for his path, he should not charge. That was his rule from his teacher, but it was not something which he told to me or to anyone else who I know that has learned from him.

For this reason, it seems to me that the way to judge a humble Western student is to see if they can part with a relatively small, reasonable sum of money as honorarium. This is how it is left up to Heaven who learns from me and who does not. A sincere student will pay $300 easily. Let us say that when I teach a Kung Fu seminar I charge $150-$200 to learn an advanced form. A diligent student will pay this if they are hungry for the advanced form. In this way, it tells me something about them. For advanced meditation, $300 is very, very low. No one charges so little to learn Nei Kung. This price is just enough to tell me if even a young man or woman is sincere about learning, or if they think that even something as prized as Mo Pai should not cost them less than a many people pay for a car payment in one month. I know that Lung Men Pai seminars with Shifu Wang, Li-Ping cost much more than this, and his motivation is quite the same. I understand this, but I also understand that many people cannot afford the prices that he charges. Since he is making a living off of teaching, and also paying his teachers, while I am only charging primarily to gauge the sincerity of the student, and as well to help the fund that I have donated to, then it is reasonable for the cost to be much lower, even though the Mo Pai teachings are much more coveted in the West than Lung Men Pai. With that said, I present to you the third edition of this offering.