Flowing water never rots. From that single line of Vietnamese folk wisdom, this book builds a whole philosophy of living — one written not in a university hall but in a simple house in the Mekong Delta, and finished at 2:40 in the morning of February 8, 2002. Absolute Law asks the plainest and hardest questions at once: What is health, and why does the body rot when it stops moving? What is happiness, and why do the richest people so often live the poorest lives? What law governs success, and what price must be paid for it? Moving between the Buddha and Marx, between Eastern impermanence and Western reasoning, the author sets out two laws he spent a lifetime testing against his own hardship: the law 0 x infinity, by which the universe forms from zero, and the law that gives this book its motto — that whatever ceases to flow begins to rot. Written in the honest, unadorned voice of a man who learned philosophy from surviving, this is a book for anyone who has ever asked how to live well with very little.