About
Founder & Trust
Who made this. Why it exists. What it will never become.
Who
CD Damitio made Baoism. He is not a spiritual teacher. He is an author who has written more than thirty books over twenty-five years from places most people don't write from: a rooftop in a shepherd village in Morocco, a stone house in Fez, a kitchen in Otaru, Japan, a VW bus on the Oregon coast, a second-floor apartment in a Turkish town where nobody spoke English and he didn't speak Turkish.
He was a Marine. He was a stockbroker. He was homeless on purpose and then homeless not on purpose. He lived in a van in Hawaii. He has been to more than fifty countries and lived long enough to call it living in about a dozen of them. He is currently 54 and based in Japan about half the year.
He is not a guru. He is not a life coach. He is not selling a course. He has never run a retreat. He does not have a certification in anything that would qualify him to tell you how to live. What he has is thirty years of trying to figure out how to live without being a piece of shit, and three sentences that turned out to be the whole answer.
Why Baoism exists
It started because nothing else worked.
CD converted to Christianity as a teenager — not by choice. In his twenties he became a Nichiren Buddhist through Soka Gakkai. In his thirties he converted to Islam, mostly to marry his ex-wife. He read Krishnamurti, Lao Tzu, the Sufis, Hesse, Orwell, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky. He sat in mosques and temples and churches and one very strange bar in Istanbul. He talked to God frequently and never got a clear answer back.
Every tradition had something. None of them had only the thing. They all came with hierarchy, or fees, or gatekeepers, or a requirement to believe something specific before you could start practicing. The practice was always behind a wall.
Baoism is what's left when you take down the wall.
Three instructions. No prerequisites. No membership. No belief required.
Stop Tox. Stop doing the harmful things you already know are harmful. You don't need a teacher to identify them. You need a teacher to remind you to stop.
Do Rox. Fill the hole the harmful things leave. Fill it with work that makes the people around you better, not worse. The work is humble. It doesn't get a statue. It doesn't need one.
Bao Ji. Help one other person stop their harmful things and start their good things. Then help another. The practice is transmitted person to person, never institution to institution, because institutions corrupt practices and people — in the right circumstances — do not.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
What "Bao" means
A bao is a Chinese dumpling. Plain outside. Treasure inside.
It's also the tree under which enlightenment was found. And the sound of bowing. And the sound of a branch.
The philosophy is the dumpling. You can't tell what's inside by looking at the outside. You have to bite into it.
Ji means teacher. Bao Ji means teacher of Baoism — the act of helping someone else practice. Not from a stage. Not for money. Just one person showing another person the three steps and then getting out of the way.
What Baoism isn't
This section exists because the internet has trained you to expect a bait-and-switch. Here is the switch that will never come:
No course. There is no paid tier of Baoism. There is no advanced level you unlock after giving someone your credit card number. The Starter Guide is free. The practice is free. The three instructions are the practice.
No guru. CD is a writer, not a spiritual authority. He made Baoism because he needed it. He shared it because other people seemed to need it too. If you find a better framework, use that one.
No organization. There is no Baoism board of directors. There is no Baoism nonprofit. There are no dues. You cannot be excommunicated because you were never communicated in the first place.
No required belief. You don't have to believe in God, karma, energy, vibrations, manifestation, crystals, astrology, or CD Damitio. You just have to be willing to stop doing harmful things, start doing good things, and help someone else do the same.
No recruitment. Bao Ji — helping others practice — is not evangelism. You don't bring people to Baoism. You help people who are already trying to be less shitty. If they ask what you're doing, you can tell them. If they don't ask, you helped anyway. That's the point.
Where Baoism lives
Baoism is in the books. It's the framework underneath Rough Living, where a man learns to survive by figuring out what to stop doing. It's the Ethereum Priests in Sly Doubt of Uranus, who carry the practice across ten centuries and into space. It's the undercurrent in The Fucking People, where the world ends and people have to decide what they're willing to do for each other.
It's also here, on this site. And on CD's Substack at indignified.substack.com, where the Daily Baoist entries started.
The practice doesn't require reading anything. But if you want to see what it looks like when someone tries to live it — and fails at it regularly — the books are the record.
Trust
You found this page because you want to know if this is real or if it's another internet grift with good typography.
Here's what CD has never done:
- Charged money for Baoism content
- Run a Baoism retreat or workshop
- Sold a Baoism certification
- Promised that practicing Baoism will make you rich, thin, or happy
- Used Baoism to build an email list, a funnel, or a product launch
Here's what CD has done:
- Written thirty-plus books, most of them before Baoism had a name
- Lived in more than a dozen countries on his own dime
- Published the Starter Guide for free with no email gate
- Put the entire framework in three sentences on the homepage where anyone can read it without clicking anything
The trust model is: everything is already in front of you. There is nothing behind the curtain. The curtain doesn't exist.
Start with the three instructions. If they work, keep going. If they don't, you lost nothing.