The Tao Te Ching: A Tamil Siddha Reading of Lao Tzu — Boganathar, Kundalini, and the Shiva-Shakti Roots of Daoism

Robert S. Shumake, publishing as Ajarn Shaman Shu, has lived two lives in one — the builder and the priest — and his books are where the two meet. In business, he rose from a Ford factory floor to lead a Black Enterprise-ranked private equity firm, where, as founding president and CEO of Inheritance Capital Group, he developed a real estate portfolio of nearly 3 million square feet valued at over $300 million. He served as honorary consul for Botswana and Tanzania, founded the Robert S. Shumake Scholarship Relays and the HBCU Challenge. Through his foundation he funded a clean-water well in rural Kenya serving more than 1,000 residents and 300 schoolchildren, and he founded the Commissary Grant initiative to fund commissary support for incarcerated people. Today he stands as founder of Inheritance Media Group, owner of more than 300 publications — the second-largest newspaper company in America by number of newspapers — built to bring healing, meditation, and a positive voice to media. He is a pioneer of AI media: his Living Archive restores America's forgotten newspapers with AI, his 300+ publications are produced by an AI-run newsroom, and his book The Original AI reads the 256 Odù of Ifá as the original intelligence system. In spirit, each tradition that initiated him gave him its name — Ajarn Shaman Shu — Buddhist Ajarn, monk and teacher in the Theravada and Vajrayana lines, Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola in Ifá, Shri Surya Narayana Swamikal in the Tamil Siddha line, among the few Swamikals in the United States. He received his training sitting with some of the top gurus and shamans in the world. He is the Oluwo of Osain, high priest of Osain — one of the only living teachers initiated across Yorùbá, Buddhist, Hindu/Dravidian, and Kemetic traditions — and the founder of Soul Tribes International Ministries and of Buddha Digital Temple and its universities — Orisha University, Buddha University, and Shiva University — where he teaches meditation, breathwork, ancestral healing, and consciousness. A foremost expert in plant medicine, he authored Detroit's Proposal E — the 2021 ballot initiative, passed with 61 percent of the vote, that decriminalized entheogenic plants in Detroit — and wrote Shurooms, his work on sacred mushrooms and healing. Across both lives he is the author of more than 140 published books and 86+ DOI-registered academic publications, spanning Ifá and Òrìṣà spirituality, Buddhist practice, consciousness, wealth, and restored American history, including the 69-volume Living Archive Series restoring America's forgotten newspapers. His philosophy in business and in spirit is the same: the Double Bottom Line — make a profit, and make a difference.