ONE SIMPLE FORMULA FOR EVERY KNOT IN LIFE: KEEP THE WATER MOVING. Why do some people work all their lives and never get ahead — never quite feel well, never quite feel at peace? Not for lack of luck, this book argues, but because they have not yet seen the law running beneath their own lives. Written in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam and completed in the small hours of a February morning in 2002, ABSOLUTE LAW distills a lifetime of folk wisdom, Eastern philosophy, and hard personal experience into two laws the author holds sufficient to move a human life. The first: 0 x infinity — the universe forms from zero. The second gives this book its motto: FLOWING WATER NEVER ROTS. Whatever circulates, lives; whatever stagnates, decays. Breath and blood. Money and work. Knowledge and the mind itself. From curing his own "incurable" asthma with nothing but disciplined breathing, to the arithmetic of thrift that separates happiness from misery by exactly 0.2, to auto-suggestion, the art of study, and the management of money, the author reasons like a mathematician and talks like a neighbor over tea. Along the way he draws on the Buddha and Lao Tzu, Marx and Dale Carnegie, Pasteur and Napoleon Hill — and on the rice fields, river markets, and family kitchens of southern Vietnam. This is Vietnamese folk philosophy in its own voice: practical, stubborn, warm, and unafraid of the biggest questions. Right perception, right action — and keep the water moving.