The Tao of Wu is a unique book of wisdom and experience, reaching from the most violent slums of New York City to the highest planes of spiritual thought, authored by The RZA, hip-hop's most exalted wise man.

The RZA, the Abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan and hip-hop culture's most dynamic genius, imparts the lessons he's learned on a journey that took him from the Staten Island projects to international superstardom. Along the way, he has been a devout student of knowledge in every form he's found it—on the streets, in religion, in martial arts, in chess, and in popular culture.

Part chronicle of an extraordinary life and part spiritual and philosophical discourse, The Tao of Wu is a nonfiction Siddhartha for the hip-hop generation—an engaging and thought-provoking book that will enlighten, entertain, and inspire.

The legions of Wu-Tang fans are accustomed to this heady mix; their obsession with the band's puzzle-like lyrics and elaborate mythology has propelled the group through years of dazzling, multi-platform success.

In The Wu-Tang Manual, the RZA provided a glimpse of how that mythology worked. In The Tao of Wu, he takes us deep inside the complex wisdom and spirituality at the core of his commercial and creative success. The book is built around significant moments in the RZA's life when he faced dramatic turning points, either bad (a potential prison sentence) or good (a record deal that could lift his family out of poverty), and the lessons he took from each experience.

His points of view are always surprising and provocative, revealing a profound, genuine, and abiding wisdom—consistently tempered with humor and peppered with unique, colloquial phraseology. This is a spiritual memoir as the world has never seen before, and will never see again.