About the Authors

This is a site of co-creation. The books begin with Guru Ruru’s original vision and reach English readers through my translation, adaptation, and interpretation. The words, images, and design have been shaped through an ongoing dialogue with AI—guided by human intention, refined through countless iterations. In that sense, this site is itself an expression of what The Fourth Axial Age advocates: not humans or AI, but humans creating with AI.

Guru Ruru

Guru Ruru was born in Anhui, into a family of factory workers. No lineage, no temple, no expectation of anything spiritual. His parents raised him to make a living.

He did. He ran one business after another — a restaurant, an advertising firm, a technology company, a gambling venture. Some made money. Some collapsed. He lived at high speed and didn't ask what any of it was for.

He wasn't unhappy, exactly. There was too much movement for unhappiness to catch up. He remembers those years now as purposeless — a life of noise, in the exact sense the book uses the word. The aching hollow was already there. He just hadn't stopped long enough to hear it.

What ended it wasn't a crisis. A monk arrived at his door, sent years earlier by his dying master to find this particular person. And everything Guru Ruru had been running from caught up with him.

What happened next is hard to write about without slipping into hagiography, which he hates. So I'll say only this: something opened. The running stopped. He began, slowly, to see what he had spent 31 years not seeing. And once he could see it, he couldn't stop seeing it in every face he passed on the street.

The Fourth Axial Age is his answer. He's not trying to build a following. He's trying to help 144 thousand people wake up — enough, he believes, to shift human consciousness so that AGI opens as a homecoming rather than a shipwreck. This threshold is not a mystical number. Just the minimum needed.

He travels constantly and doesn't teach as often, so catching him in person is rare. This English adaptation is my attempt to open a door for readers who can't sit with him.

Dr. Ying Lee

I'm a venture investor by day. Twenty years close to the technologies remaking the world — Silicon Valley Office of McKinsey, Kleiner Perkins, YF Capital with Jack Ma, now my own fund Atma Capital.

Twenty years, quietly, on the other side of that. Mount Kailash Pilgrimages. Yoga and Taichi Practices. Freediving, where the mind has to be still or the body won't last. That inner life is what led me to Guru Ruru. The Fourth Axial Age is the first of his books I'm translating.

The translation, the images, this whole site — none of it was made alone. Every page passed through long conversations with AI. Over many quiet nights, my instinct and its patience met on the screen until each chapter settled into what it wanted to be. This is itself a small demonstration of what the book argues: the Fourth Axial isn't carbon defeating silicon or silicon replacing carbon. It's the two of them, quietly, learning to work as one.

I hold degrees from MIT and an MD in traditional Chinese medicine, which is why this work of rediscovering old wisdom fascinates me. Advisory roles at MIT's School of Engineering and Media Lab, and Zhejiang University. I live in San Diego with my family, and visit Asia every few months.

If you’d like to reach me directly, the address is y@ylee.com. I'll answer as best as I can.