(1982)  According to local author Ben Hoff, Winnie the Pooh is a master of an ancient Chinese philosophy. Hoff's book, "The Tao of Pooh" states that the beloved bear of children's literature, created by A.A. Milne in 1926, has actually been teaching principles of Taoism, a 4,000-year-old philosophy. Hoff describes the characters in the Milne books like figures in a Chinese parable: "While Eeyore frets ... and Piglet hesitates ... and Rabbit calculates ... and Owl pontificates ... Pooh just is."

E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., which had published the Milne books, contracted to publish Hoff's book, which was released last April. It already has sold nearly 30,000 copies. The principles of Tao can be very useful to Americans, Hoff said. "They were the world'd first ecologists. In Tao, all extremes are unhealthy, the clenched fist or the limp fist. The frantic American who overdoes everything is headed for stress, traffic accidents and an early death."

Hoff also draws an analogy between his childhood and that of Christopher Robin Milne, who was the inspiration for the Pooh books. "Like Christopher Robin, I grew up on what had been a farm in the countryside," now the Sylvan neighborhood of Portland, "with a chicken house, a well and a barn. It was bordered by an old abandoned orchard, which seemed almost as mysterious to me at night as the Hundred Acre Wood in the Pooh books. Like Christopher Robin, I spent every possible moment alone in the forest, learning things that were to eventually bring me to Taoist principles. Thank God for the forest."

Author Ben Hoff & Pooh