Change the World by Changing Yourself with Monk Yun Rou

It’s easy to get outraged by world events, frustrated by our own personal battles, and disenfranchised from government and leadership.

Born of moral indignation, informed by decades of study, and seasoned by a life of devoted self-cultivation, today's special guest Monk Yun Rou’s book Mad Monk Manifesto. This book has the answers we’re looking for, organically cohering personal prescriptions and calls to social and political action in one powerful document.

Based on ancient Chinese wisdom such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Mad Monk Manifesto is part tour guide to consciousness, part recipe for personal development, part prescription for environmental salvation, and part handbook for social change. In the same way ripples move away from a stone dropped into a pond, Mad Monk Manifesto begins with our personal lives, discussing topics such as diet, exercise, meditation, and mind/body practice, and spreads to our public environment, describing ideas such as what we can do to improve the community, the government, and the world.

Emerge with a new way of seeing life, a series of concrete steps to take for personal transformation, and an action plan for working in the community to provoke change. 

Daoist Monk Yun Rou (formerly Arthur Rosenfeld) received his academic background at Yale, Cornell, and the University of California. In 2012 he was ordained a Daoist monk at the Chun Yang (Pure Yang) Daoist Temple in Guangzhou, China, one of the first Westerners to be so honored. Yun Rou believes in the beauty and power of story and in the importance of compassion. Blending literature, biology, and medicine with an orthodox Daoist education, his writings and teachings propagate Daoist ideas and focus on environmental conservation, and political and social justice.