This is not biography as backdrop. The contemplative dimension is the source of the work — the actual root from which the books, the research, and the career draw their coherence.
This page is personal, honest, and non-evangelical. It is a description of a path — not an invitation to walk it.
Before I had any choice in the matter, I was given the first mark of the path: a kwepang ceremony on my left ear, performed in the Taoist-Buddhist-spiritualist tradition of my paternal lineage. The ear piercing, dedicated to Sanguan Dadi, is still there. It was not removed when I entered Catholic school. It was not removed during twenty-two years in multinational corporations. Some marks are not meant to be removed.
The paternal family's spiritual orientation — rooted in Nusantara Taoism, popular Buddhism, and a form of devotional practice that predates the administrative categories that the Indonesian state would later impose on it — was the first current of my formation. It was not named or theorized. It was simply present in the household, in the rituals, in the way my first Taoist master entered my life through that same lineage.
I was educated in Catholic institutions. This is not unusual for Indonesian Chinese families who value rigour and discipline in education. What it produced, in me, was not conversion — but something perhaps more valuable: a deep familiarity with the grammar of a tradition I did not inhabit from the inside.
To understand how a tradition reads its own sacred categories, how it calibrates sin and virtue, how it relates to what lies outside itself — this is not knowledge you get from studying it from a distance. You get it by spending years inside its classrooms, its prayers, its year-long rhythms. That formation is visible in every page of Buddhist KTP.
Before I had formal categories for what I was experiencing and seeking, Guruji Anand Krishna's books gave me an intellectual framework. He was the first writer who showed me that the contemplative and the analytical were not in tension — that rigour and depth could point in the same direction. That early influence is traceable in the tone of everything I have since written.
In June 2023, I received initiation into Shambavi Mahamudra at an Inner Engineering Completion program. That initiation marked a transition from spiritual interest and informal practice into committed daily discipline. Approximately two to three hours of practice daily, maintained consistently since that point.
In 2025 and 2026, I participated in advanced programs at the Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore. Each stay deepened the practice past what can be achieved through home-based routines — the IYC environment accelerates things that ordinary life does not reach.
I wear an Isha Sarpa Sutra — a silver ring on the Apollo finger of my left hand. The physics of what that ring does, and why that particular placement matters, are not mysticism. They are a precise application of a knowledge system that predates the frameworks I use in my academic work by several millennia.
In September 2024 I went to Mount Kailash for the first time. This was not a tourist trip. Kailash — Kailasam, the abode of Shiva in the Shaivite map of the cosmos, Tise in the Bon and Tibetan Buddhist cartography — is one of the few places on Earth where multiple sacred traditions converge on the same mountain without any of them claiming ownership. To be present at a site that has drawn pilgrims for thousands of years, across traditions, is to understand something about sacred geography that cannot be theorized from outside.
That first visit was a threshold. What came before it and what came after it are not the same.
This mid-2026 I will return to Kailash for the full circumambulation — the Kora, 52 km around the mountain at altitude, crossing Dolma La at 5,630 metres. Where the first visit was a threshold, the Kora is the crossing.
A third visit is planned for Saga Dawa 2028 — the full-moon month that marks the birth, enlightenment, and parinirvana of the Buddha, and one of the most sacred periods in the Tibetan calendar for Kailash pilgrimage. Each visit builds on what the previous one opened.
The ear piercing from my kwepang ceremony and the Sarpa Sutra on my Apollo finger are separated by more than forty years and two different contemplative lineages. They are also, in some sense I cannot fully articulate, the same kind of mark — a physical anchor for something that does not need to be named to be real.
Catholic school formation · Economics degree · Twenty-two years in international corporate institutions · Professional credentials · Academic training. The current that knows institutions from the inside and speaks their grammar fluently.
Taoist-Buddhist household practice · Taoist lineage transmission · Shambavi Mahamudra · Kailash pilgrimage · Deep immersion in Dharmic intellectual tradition. The current that knows composure under uncertainty as a lived practice, not a theory.
Neither current is more fundamental than the other. The vantage point between them — neither fully inside nor outside any single system — is the actual source of the work described on this site.