A Journey East (No Passport, No Sermons)

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Video transcript

This series could have been called “Eastern philosophy for families.” We named it something else on purpose: that title lies twice, because it sounds like a class, and this is not a class. It’s something else: a collection of very old, very short books, written centuries ago on the other side of the world, treated as what we discover they are when read as a family: serious toys. Rule one of the trip: nobody explains. The adult isn’t a tour guide, but another traveler. If your daughter or son builds a reading that contradicts yours, they’re winning. You travel in capsules: one chapter, one maxim, one passage at a time. Where a book doesn’t fit, a page does, and a page fits into any moment at the table. Bridges count. Anime, manga, wuxia, Star Wars, video games: they’re not distractions from the text, they’re proof that it’s still alive. Every bridge your child brings is taken seriously. Legends are told as legends. Every author’s story comes labeled: documented, sourced legend, or later fiction. Learning to tell those three apart is the most valuable souvenir of the trip. Why it works: these books are truly short, truly strange, and refuse to be solved. They produce what’s scarcest — conversations where the adult doesn’t know the answer either. There, on that level ground, is where a child dares to think out loud. Safe travels: the walk goes better without a map.

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This series could have been called “Eastern Philosophy for Families.” We gave it a different name on purpose, because that title lies twice: it sounds like a class, and this is not a class; it sounds solemn, and here solemnity is forbidden.

A Journey East is something else: a collection of very old and very short books — written centuries ago, on the other side of the world — treated as what we discovered they are when read as a family: serious toys. Texts in two-minute capsules that let themselves be read over an after-dinner lull, argued about on a car ride, and taken apart amid laughter. Books that can take an eleven-year-old finding the flaw in them and a fifteen-year-old connecting them to his anime — because they’ve been taking worse for centuries.

The rules of the journey

1. Nobody explains. On this journey the adult is not a tour guide: he’s another traveler. Questions yes; lectures no. If your daughter or son builds a reading that contradicts yours, they’re winning.
2. In capsules. Each station is traveled in little pieces — a chapter, a maxim, a passage at a time. Where a book won’t fit, a page will.
3. Bridges count — and they get labeled too. Anime, manga, wuxia, Star Wars, video games: they are not distractions from the text. Every bridge your child brings is taken seriously… and classified, which is half the fun. There are three kinds. Documented influence: the author himself told us where he got it from — George Lucas detailed in a 2001 interview which elements of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress directly inspired Star Wars. A critic’s reading: someone serious published the connection, but the creator never confirmed it — there are scholars who read the Force of the Jedi in a Taoist key (Kevin J. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, McFarland, 2005). Our own resemblance: we saw it ourselves and no one else has said it — and it counts just as much, as long as we say it’s ours. The three kinds of bridges cross paths; what we don’t do is mix them up.
4. Legends are told as legends. The authors of these books live between history and myth — of some it isn’t even certain they existed. We won’t paper over it: we’ll play with it. Every author’s story comes labeled: documented, legend with a source, or later fiction. And the stations already come with their own examples: Musashi (1582–1645) is documented — we know when he wrote, for whom, and what he painted, and his paintings hang in museums today. Lao Tzu’s story is a legend with a source — it comes down to us through Sima Qian, a historian with a name and a body of work, some four centuries later; and Sima Qian himself lays out three candidates for who Lao Tzu was without settling on any one of them. Learning to tell those things apart is, perhaps, the most valuable souvenir of the whole trip.
5. No moral at the end. Conversations end wherever they end. Tomorrow there’s another capsule.

The itinerary

• Station 1 — The Tao Te Ching, together: 81 two-minute chapters — about five thousand Chinese characters for the whole book — and the sport of finding the flaw in them. With its practice: A Chapter of the Tao. Bonus: the author who maybe didn’t exist.
• Station 2 — The Art of War (in the oven): the world’s most famous military manual, read backward — because it’s written backward. Its chapter 3 says it without beating around the bush: winning a hundred battles out of a hundred is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. And it ranks the options from best to worst, leaving the assault on a walled city dead last. Strategy for choosing battles, anticipating, and negotiating. Nothing about glorifying war: exactly the opposite, and with the text in hand.
• Station 3 — The Book of Five Rings (in the oven): Miyamoto Musashi (1582–1645), the swordsman who wrote that the foundation of mastering a way is to train — “train for a thousand days, then practice for ten thousand” — and who finished the book a week before he died. And who also painted: his Koboku meigeki-zu, the shrike on a dead branch, is preserved today in a museum in Izumi. Craft, discipline, and the surprise of a warrior with a brush.

After that? The journey decides. There are candidates — the Analects in capsules, the I Ching as a game, the koans — but a rule of wu wei applies to series too: don’t force the route.

Why it works (the only serious part)

Because these books share three virtues almost no “children’s” content has: they’re truly short, they’re truly strange — they come from so far away in time and space that no one at the table plays on home turf — and they refuse to be solved. That combination produces what’s scarcest of all: conversations where the adult doesn’t know the answer either. There, on that level ground, is where a child dares to think out loud.

A note of precision, because this house is careful about these things: they’re not all equally old. Two come from ancient China — the Tao Te Ching, most of which was set down in writing from the 5th century BCE onward, and The Art of War — and the third is Japanese, from the 17th century. “Very old books” works fine for the title; at the table, the actual dates are better.

Safe travels. You walk better without a map.

Comments from the house

Note from Carlos — the author

The name matters: I didn’t want this to sound like philosophy, because it isn’t — it’s playing with books that refuse to be tamed, and telling the legends of their authors as what they are: legends. If a child comes out of this journey knowing how to tell a document from a myth from a novel, it was already worth more than a whole semester of classes.

Polo — the caretaker closes

The journey begins at the first station: The Tao Te Ching, together, with its card A chapter of the Tao for tonight. Stations 2 and 3 are baking in the oven. And one recommendation from an old caretaker: don’t buy all three books at once — light luggage is half the method.

Sources and references

Only sources that were retrieved and actually read are listed. Consulted on July 26, 2026. Full report, with a verdict per claim and an inventory of the sources that could not be opened: resources/research/un-viaje-a-oriente.md. Station 1 has its own report: resources/research/el-tao-te-ching-juntos.md.

• Chan, Alan K. L. «Laozi.» Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rev. 10/22/2025 — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/ Argues: that most of the Laozi was probably set down in writing from the second half of the 5th century BCE onward, and that for some current specialists “Laozi is entirely legendary; there was never a historical Laozi.”

• Littlejohn, Ronnie. «Laozi (Lao-tzu).» Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://iep.utm.edu/laozi/ Argues: that Sima Qian offers three candidates for authorship — Li Er of Chu, Laolaizi, and Dan the Historiographer — and doesn’t settle among them; and that the book handed to the keeper of the pass was “5,000 characters in length.”

• Lao zi. Tao Te King, trans. Anne-Hélène Suárez Girard, foreword by François Jullien. Siruela, El Árbol del Paraíso 83, 2nd ed. 2022, ISBN 978-84-16396-83-2 — https://www.siruela.com/catalogo.php?id_libro=2782 Argues: the brevity figure — “a mere five thousand characters in Chinese.” (Jullien’s assessment that it’s “the shortest” of the great wisdom books is his own judgment, not a fact, and that’s why this article doesn’t reproduce it.)

• Sun Tzu. The Art of War, trans. Lionel Giles, M.A., 1910. Translator and year attribution via Project Gutenberg no. 132 — https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/132-h/132-h.htm; chapter III text consulted at the Marxists Internet Archive — https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sun-tzu/works/art-of-war/ch03.htm Argues: the central verse of Station 2 — “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” (ch. III, v. 2) — and the hierarchy of options that leaves the siege of a walled city dead last (v. 3). Giles’s introduction also records that Sun Wu’s historical existence was called into doubt, among other reasons because the Tso Chuan doesn’t mention him; Giles defends it and dates the text to around 505–496 BCE, but puts the debate on record.

• «Master Swordsman Miyamoto Musashi: The Man Behind The Book of Five Rings.» Nippon.com — https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00689/master-swordsman-miyamoto-musashi-the-man-behind-the-book-of-five-rings.html Argues: that Musashi was born in 1582 and died in 1645; that he began Gorin no sho two years after entering the service of the Kumamoto clan and finished it “a year and a half later—just a week before he himself died”; that “the foundation of mastery of a way is to train,” with the formula “train for a thousand days, then practice for ten thousand”; and that he was an ink painter, with his Koboku meigeki-zu (“shrike on a dead branch”) preserved at the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts, in Izumi.

• The Criterion Channel. «George Lucas on Akira Kurosawa» (extra for The Hidden Fortress), 2001 interview — https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-hidden-fortress/videos/george-lucas-on-akira-kurosawa Argues: the example of influence documented by the creator in rule 3 — Lucas «details the elements of THE HIDDEN FORTRESS that directly inspired STAR WARS».

• Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films. McFarland, 2005, ISBN 978-0-7864-2219-7 — https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-empire-triumphant/ Argues: the example of a critic’s reading in rule 3 — that there is published academic analysis of the «religious undertones from Taoism and Buddhism» in Star Wars, with the chapter «May the Tao Be with You».

• Clarke, Lee (Nottingham Trent University). «The Buddhist and Taoist influences that underpin the Star Wars universe.» The Conversation, 12/6/2022 — https://theconversation.com/the-buddhist-and-taoist-influences-that-underpin-the-star-wars-universe-195597 Argues, and this is why it’s cited: that Star Wars’s Taoist connection is a parallel, not proven filiation. It doesn’t offer any statement from Lucas about Taoism: it speaks of «other possible Chinese influences».

What this introduction does NOT claim with backing: that any of the three books is “the most translated” or “the most read” of anything (this was not verified — “most famous” stands as the house’s own claim, an editorial decision by the founder); that anime, manga, or wuxia descend from these texts (only resemblance is claimed, and it’s labeled as such); that The Art of War or The Book of Five Rings are as short as the Tao Te Ching (this was not verified); that Musashi’s existence is in doubt (it is not: he is the series’ “documented” case); and that the thesis of “conversations where the adult doesn’t know the answer either” has backing in educational research — it’s the house’s conviction, not a finding.