Having lost so very many family members in Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust, it may be that rebelliousness and righteous indignation are lodged in my genetic memory. My grandmother was the sole surviving member of her family of gifted Viennese intellectuals and musicians. My father’s luminous career began with a very real struggle to simply survive, his childhood darkened by the looming threat of genocide. Even after the Second World War came to a close, the burbling of anti-Semitism had every Jew fearing a loud knock on the door in the middle of the night. Life seemed so fragile and fraught, the individual so powerless, that assuming a dubious, even cynical posture seemed about right. As a teenager, I became prickly, obstinate, stubborn, and indomitable. I favored my middle finger over all others.
And then I saw my first Bruce Lee movie.
I was immediately entranced. Here, in the brand-new category of kung fu superhero, was empowerment and invulnerability of an exotic and marvelous kind—accessible, too, at least compared to flying around in tights and a cape. Nobody was dragging Bruce to the gas chambers, nor were they abducting David Carradine’s character, Kwai Chang Caine, ass-kicking star of the TV show Kung Fu. Out of left field or, more precisely, out of a fantasy version of China, came the precise steering wheel I needed to make a sudden left turn in my life. A sickly child, I wasn’t strong and healthy enough to actually do Chinese martial arts, but I could certainly become an armchair gladiator.
And I could learn from books. Fascinated by the monks on Kung Fu—though never dreaming I would one day become one—I read widely on Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, thereby discovering the glue that has held China together longer than any other continuously-existing culture on the planet. I especially noted the tension between the latter two systems of thought. Confucianism prescribes top-down authority; Daoism stresses the debt a leader owes to his people. Confucianism respects fixed social roles: Daoism emphasizes wu wei—relaxed, effortless, unconstrained natural living. Confucianism legislates loyalty and respect for others; Daoism prizes self-expression and the bonds that arise naturally between people.
Famous not only for their ability to see to the heart of nature and the affairs of men, but also for their martial and sexual prowess, the first Daoists were Bacchanalian men and women. Worshippers of nature and connoisseurs of the sensual, they were equally likely to be found legislating at a high level of the imperial court, meditating for a month in a cold mountain cave, or engaging in a bout of orgiastic revelry in the forest. Quietly influential and powerful, they were scholars, librarians, archers, swordsmen, generals, and fortune-tellers to kings. Their emphasis on the human sensorium of sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell led many to become poets and painters in the wilderness school, keen renderers of the beauty of nature and man’s tiny role within it. In their view, nature has already addressed the problems with which people so tightly grapple, and has found solutions to all of them. There is no need, according to the Daoist way, to replay that well-sorted drama. Everything we need, from personal guidance to political principles, exists right before us in the natural world. Our only job is to pay attention and follow the cues.
Through all my childhood readings, I most loved the flat-out weirdness of Laozi’s Daodejing, Daoism’s foundational classic: its rebelliousness, irrepressibility, fearless insistence on the existence of higher laws and principles, revolutionary defiance of authoritarian intrusiveness, and perhaps, most of all, its shamanic roots and resultant emphasis on nature, intuition, mysticism, and transcendence. Daoism, it turned out, gave a framework to the revolution I somehow sensed was required in the West. It cut right to the bone of everything.
This is not a memoir, so I have omitted much about my personal journey. Though I remain far less than the man I one day hope to be, I’ve seen great and terrible things, traveled the world, lost one wife to a car accident, and gained another with whom I’ve raised a fine son. I’ve been persecuted in ugly ways and seen family members die horrific deaths. I’ve watched my parents sadly decline, said goodbye to my father, and endured mortal challenges to my own health. I have been a park ranger, corporate executive, advertising copywriter, management ramrod, zookeeper, screenwriter, speaker, novelist, martial artist, philosophy teacher, and, most importantly, monk. I have spent decades studying Daoist arts with a brilliant master and shared those arts and ideas with an audience of thousands (millions if you include my work on television).
Despite the dark and dire start to this introduction, I do not believe it is necessary to let the obfuscating razzle-dazzle of what we call civilization, with its lap dogs—culture, society, and politics—stop us from listening to our intuition about what is right and true and kind and important. I believe that, by acknowledging our miniscule role in an infinite landscape, as Daoist artists do, we can step off the path of widespread pain, suffering, and injustice and onto one of joy, equality, compassion, and mutual respect. Philosophically and spiritually, we are evolving in the direction of being able to do this. Evolution is not a linear process. Rather, it radiates in all directions, producing a wide range of beautiful examples of intelligence, physical capacities, shapes, sizes, and strategies.
Among other important improvements, we are increasingly sensitive to what we are doing to the planet. More, though still abused around the world, human rights have at least become a subject of major discussion and concern. We have abolished slavery in most places. Women are slowly but increasingly left in charge of their own bodies. Domestic violence, racism, and sexism are coming into the critical spotlight of public opinion. We are starting to recognize that substance abuse is a disease and that mental illness is not a character deficit. We are questioning the torture and consumption of sentient beings. We are facing corruption’s corrosive presence in our governments and societies. Perhaps, most significantly, we are finally, though again too slowly, recognizing the poison in religious extremism and other fictions of faith.
We have reached the point in our evolution where our survival depends upon us coming to understand how our minds work, how our minds drive our behavior, and how our behavior affects the world. Every ill in the world begins as an illness inside a human being, and every human illness has an emotional and spiritual element. Mahatma Gandhi, not a Daoist but a person who understood, as most spiritual people do, the link between our minds and our world, declared: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” More profound and beautiful words have rarely been spoken. To counter the catastrophes of our time, we must address our chaotic compendium of personal confusions. We must peel back layer after layer of misunderstanding, self-indulgence, lack of discipline, misguided beliefs, and pathological disconnection from the natural world. The fruit of such internal resolution is external revolution. In a world of awakened human beings, so much of what is flat-out wrong can no longer stand. If we can evolve fast enough, we can tip the scales back in favor of our species, and of the rest of the world, too.
The blueprint that follows is based on the notion of building a strong body as a foundation for an awakened mind, then using that mind to assume personal responsibility and fully awaken the self. This prescription applies even when fortune fades, moods change, circumstances worsen, and titillation dims. It emphasizes connecting with others (once we have done the work to repair damage to ourselves) and then with all of nature. It includes both hints for personal spiritual hygiene and sweeping political creeds melded together in what is the quintessence of Daoism. All this may seem mad in the sense of crazy, utopian, naïve, outrageous, extreme, unrealistic, quixotic, and hopelessly romantic, but Daoists have followed this path for millennia and never found it lacking.
I believe that the most effective way to help each other onto the path is to foster constructive dialog, particularly with those in other “tribes,” about what matters most to them and their communities. The increasing number of seemingly impenetrable borders between us—including religious fundamentalism, greed and self-interest on a national scale, and, not least, tech-centered communication that minimizes altruism and empathy—have deprived us of such dialogs, substituting for them superficial exchanges that are quite often more bombast and bluster than compassionate substance. If we could use the ideas in this manifesto as a starting point for sustained, open, and positive channels of communication, we would certainly do better than could any top-down cohering force (an oxymoron if there ever was one), much better than any biblical or alien savior, and much better than