He had everyone’s attention,
and he walked away from it.

I — The noise

Kevin Wu was one of the first Asian-American stars the internet made by itself. Millions of subscribers, a season of The Amazing Race run with his father, films, a charity channel that built a school in Kenya and had his name put on it. By his early twenties he was, by any measure anyone was using, winning.

In September 2013 he stopped uploading. He has never made much of it, and the internet has made a great deal of it on his behalf.

II — Why he left

He left to meditate, and to study.

His own account, written on his Monk.College blog, April 2016 — where he described an interest in Buddhism and in transcendental meditation.

That is the whole of the explanation he gave, and it is worth sitting with how unusual it is. People leave that kind of audience for burnout, for scandal, for money. He said he left to be quiet.

III — The temple

What he found, he found at the Hare Krishna temple in Los Angeles. This is the longest he has spoken publicly about his inner life, and he spoke about it plainly:

“I came to find great hope from the temple when I still lived in LA. I was alone and seeking a spiritual path. I\u{2019}m very thankful for my experience in meeting the monks and practicing the lifestyle. It has helped me greatly and will stay with me forever.”

— Kevin Wu, quoted by name in ISKCON News, June 2017

Four things are in that sentence and none of them are small. He was alone. He was seeking a spiritual path. He practised the lifestyle rather than observing it. And he says it will stay with him forever.

A correction, because it is repeated everywhere: the line about living in the ashram full time and chanting sixteen rounds a day, often attached to Kevin, belongs to a different man in that same article — Demetrio Landeros. Kevin’s words are the ones above. This site would rather be accurate about him than impressive about him.

IV — The character

Years later he put the two halves of his life into one figure. A monk in a saffron robe with a string of beads, sitting at a wall of screens. He named the character and explained him:

“My goal is to create a character to help me navigate the future of technology and machine society. His name is m0nk.”

— Kevin Wu, on m0nk.xyz

“Everything that is man-made can be deconstructed and m0nk uses his skills as a hacker to navigate an A.I.-driven world.”

— Kevin Wu

It is a precise idea, and a devotional one. The renunciate’s claim is that the world of name and form can be seen through. The hacker’s claim is that any system built by people can be taken apart by people. m0nk makes the same claim twice, in two languages, and the artwork he commissioned with Marekolani puts the mala and the monitors in one frame so you cannot take one without the other.

V — Now

Here the public record stops, and this page stops with it. He has said he is not a monk and that he admires them. He has been described as Buddhist, and as having left Hare Krishna, and as never having left. The sources contradict each other and the most recent of them is years old.

So there is no paragraph here telling you where Kevin Wu stands with God. A man who went quiet on purpose has earned the right to break that silence himself, in his own words, on his own page.

Kevin — this section is yours. Whatever you write goes in exactly as written, and nothing gets summarised or softened on the way.