An independent house for texts that were never meant to be simplified.
Books4Books is the reading room of Buddha University Press, an imprint of Buddha Digital Temple. We publish long-form work on Yoruba cosmology, Ifá, and allied traditions — one road per book, sourced to lineage, printed to last.
Why the press exists
The press began with a practical problem. Students kept asking for one book on one road — on Ògún, on Ọ̀ṣun, on Olókun — and there was nothing to hand them. What existed was either a survey that gave every Orisha a paragraph, an academic monograph priced beyond a working reader, or a photocopied bundle circulating without attribution.
Buddha University Press was founded to close that gap: to take teaching that had been given orally over decades and set it down carefully, with its sources named and its disagreements intact. The first list is the Ifá Doorways series. It will not be the last.
Buddha University Press
Buddha University Press is the publishing arm of Buddha Digital Temple, a teaching body that has run study circles, initiations, and correspondence courses for students across four continents. The imprint carries the temple's teaching material into print so that a reader without access to a house still has access to a book.
The press is small and deliberately so. Every title is edited by hand, typeset in a text face chosen for hours of reading, and published simultaneously as a DRM-free ebook and a print-on-demand paperback through Lulu, so nothing ever goes out of print for want of a warehouse.
The editorial standard
Lineage. Every claim about practice is traced to a named source: a teacher, a house, a recorded corpus, or the author's own initiation. Where a claim cannot be traced, it is marked as inference rather than inherited teaching.
Language. Yoruba terms appear in their own orthography, glossed at first use. Diacritics stay. We do not replace a term with a European approximation for a reader's comfort.
Restraint. Material that belongs inside initiation stays inside initiation, and we say plainly when something has been withheld rather than quietly omitting it. No book here claims to replace a teacher.
Correction. When a reader shows us an error we fix the file, note it in the front matter, and re-issue. Buyers keep their download links and receive the corrected edition at the same address.
Ajarn Shaman Shu
Ajarn Shaman Shu is a teacher, initiate, and writer whose work sits at the meeting point of three lineages. He was initiated into Ifá in the Yoruba tradition, where he received the road-by-road teaching that became the Ifá Doorways series. He carries a Southeast Asian saiyasat lineage — the source of the title Ajarn — passed through years of apprenticeship in temple practice, protective work, and the ethics that govern it. And he holds a Buddhist monastic training that shapes the tone of everything he publishes: plain speech, no spectacle, and a refusal to sell certainty where none exists.
He has spent more than two decades teaching students who have no local house to sit in, first by correspondence and later through Buddha Digital Temple. The books grew directly out of those letters: the same questions arrived so often that answering them properly required a book, then eight.
Alongside the teaching, his humanitarian work runs on two tracks. Through Buddha Digital Temple he funds and staffs literacy and study material for prisoners and for rural students in Nigeria, Thailand, and Ghana — donated books, postage, and correspondence tutoring at no cost to the reader. He also supports elder-practitioner relief in the communities his teaching came from, on the principle that a tradition which feeds a writer should feed the people who kept it alive.
He writes slowly, publishes what he can stand behind, and answers his own post.