About Robert Shumake | Ajarn Shaman Shu

Robert S. Shumake, publishing as Ajarn Shaman Shu, is a Detroit-born author, spiritual teacher, archivist, and publisher. His life's work is a single argument made in two languages: as Robert Shumake, the language of business and American history; as Ajarn Shaman Shu, the language of ancient wisdom and ancestral intelligence.

He rose from a Ford factory floor to lead a Black Enterprise-ranked private equity firm — as founding president and CEO of Inheritance Capital Group, he developed a real estate portfolio of nearly 3 million square feet valued at over $300 million — and founded the Robert S. Shumake Scholarship Relays in 2005 — Michigan's largest private track and field competition, awarding scholarships to student-athletes — and founded and supported the Robert Shumake HBCU Challenge, the annual cross-country meet for historically Black colleges at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina (2009–2013) — and served as honorary consul for Botswana (2012–2015) and Tanzania (2013–2015). His first books, For Entrepreneurs Who Considered Suicide When Business Got Tough! and Climbing Your Inner Mountain, carried the lessons of that climb.

Today his catalog holds more than 140 published books and 86+ DOI-registered academic publications indexed on Zenodo, the Open Science Framework, and ORCID — Ifá and Òrìṣà spirituality, Buddhist and Tamil Siddhar traditions, meditation and breathwork, consciousness and wealth, and the 69-volume Living Archive Series, which uses AI-assisted restoration to return America's forgotten Black and Indigenous newspapers to print. Each tradition that initiated him gave him its name: Ajarn Shaman Shu — Buddhist Ajarn, monk and teacher in the Theravada and Vajrayana lines, Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola in Ifá, Shri Surya Narayana Swamikal in the Tamil Siddha line — among the few Swamikals in the United States. In his spiritual life he is Oluwo Jolaoso Osainbola — the Oluwo of Osain, high priest of Osain — one of the only living teachers initiated across Yorùbá, Buddhist, Hindu/Dravidian, and Kemetic traditions, a crossing of lineages no single-tradition teacher carries. He is a Grand Master in the Craft of Amen-Ra, in the line of Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Master of the Craft's Detroit Lodge. His training was received sitting with some of the top gurus and shamans in the world — among them his teacher Guru Prasad of India, who taught him in person for three years and brought him into the Tamil Siddha lineage. He is the founder of Soul Tribes International Ministries and of Buddha Digital Temple and its universities — Orisha University, Buddha University, and Shiva University — and he leads retreats and teachings — among them the Remember Who You Are retreat — on meditation, breathwork, ancestral healing, and consciousness. A foremost expert in plant medicine, he authored Detroit's Proposal E — the 2021 ballot initiative, passed with 61 percent of the vote, that decriminalized entheogenic plants in Detroit — and wrote Shurooms, his work on sacred mushrooms and healing.

His current work applies artificial intelligence to cultural memory: models can only learn from what was preserved, so the work is to preserve it. Today he stands as founder of Inheritance Media Group, owner of more than 300 publications — the second-largest newspaper company in America by number of newspapers — built to bring healing, meditation, and a positive voice to media. He is a pioneer of AI media: his Living Archive restores America's forgotten newspapers with AI, his 300+ publications are produced by an AI-run newsroom, and his book The Original AI reads the 256 Odù of Ifá as the original intelligence system. His philosophy remains the one he started with — the Double Bottom Line: make a profit in business, and make a difference in the community.