Robert S. Shumake — Ajarn Shaman Shu

He was born in Detroit into a family of preachers. His father, Robert Shumake Sr., was an associate pastor of Christian Temple Baptist Church who also practiced kundalini yoga; he taught his son to meditate at four years old and by six was taking him to the Hare Krishna temple in Detroit. The contemplative traditions were therefore never a departure from his Christian upbringing — they were introduced by a Baptist minister before his son could read.

His mother, Rev. Deborah L. Shumake Japhia, founded Greater One Ministries on the message Greater is He that is in you. She spent twenty-nine years in commercial printing and was known nationally as "God's Woman" — founding publisher and executive editor of God's Woman Magazine and creator of the annual God's Woman Calendar. He took Japhia, her name, as his legal surname after her death.

Every one of his surviving siblings serves in ministry, among them Rev. Nikita McCalister, President of American Baptist Churches USA, and pastors Nehru and Norflette Shumake.

Before the books, Shumake built a career in real estate and private equity, assembling a portfolio of nearly three million square feet and serving Fortune 500 clients including UPS and General Motors.

In June 2011, Black Enterprise magazine ranked his firm, Inheritance Capital Group L.L.C. of Southfield, Michigan, tenth among the nation's largest Black-owned private equity firms in its BE100s listing.

He hosted the television and radio programs Necessary Business and Take the Land, and wrote For Entrepreneurs Who Considered Suicide When Business Got Tough! — a coaching resource for people facing business failure that reached a third printing. He describes his operating principle as the "double bottom line": make a profit in business, and make a difference in the community.

In January 2011 he summited Mount Kilimanjaro despite lifelong asthma. The account became his first book, Climbing Your Inner Mountain: Ten Steps to Reaching Any Goal (Take the Land Publishing, 2013), written a decade before any of his initiations and describing the climb as a pilgrimage. All proceeds were assigned to the Shumake Family and Friends Foundation.

He is initiated in five traditions: Ifá and Òrìṣà practice (Yoruba), Thai Theravada Buddhism, the Tamil Siddhar tradition, Maasai shamanism in East Africa, and Bon jhākri shamanism in the Himalaya. He is a member of the Craft of Amen-Ra, the order founded by Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan.

In Yoruba practice he was received into the Osain high priest society — the herbal and medicinal branch — through Awo Daweed by divination, at the rank of Oluwo, "father of secrets." In Tamil practice he completed the Siddhar tradition, where medicine and realization are inseparable, and received the honorific Swamikal, conferred on completion rather than entry. Two continents, two traditions, and in both he came in through the medicine door.

His Thai transmission runs through Sadhu Dah (Ajarn Dah) and Ajarn Khaew Saksit of Chiang Mai. His Thai name, หินเคลื่อนไหว — Hin Khlueanwai — means "moving stone."

The names accumulated because each was received at a passage: an initiation, an ordination, or a death in the family. Taking a new name at initiation is near-universal in religious life.

He authored Detroit's Proposal E, the citizen ballot initiative approved by Detroit voters on November 2, 2021 by 53,730 votes to 34,234 — 61.08 percent — certified by the Wayne County Clerk. It decriminalized the personal possession and therapeutic use of entheogenic plants to the fullest extent permitted under Michigan law and made such possession the city's lowest law-enforcement priority.

It did not legalize sale or commercial distribution, and did not alter state or federal law. Detroit remains the largest majority-Black city in the United States to have decriminalized entheogenic plants.

As he told Deadline Detroit in November 2021: "I authored Prop E based upon the sole belief that people would be transformed by it. There is zero financial benefit from that mission. The goal is simple: liberate Detroiters."

He is the author of 137+ published titles, including 24 books on Ifá and Òrìṣà practice, alongside works on Buddhist philosophy, the Tamil Siddhar tradition, Tantra and yoga, plant medicine, and restored American history. Sixty-nine of those volumes form the Living Archive.

He founded four digital religious institutions — Orisha University, Buddha University, Shiva University and Krishna University — whose curricula draw on that library. The teaching is summarized by the title of one of his books, One: We Are All Connected: if the divine is genuinely present in creation, no part of creation is an abomination and no tradition holds a monopoly.