Deepak Chopra
Deepak Chopra is an actor, born 1947.
Deepak Chopra trained as a physician and then built a career arguing that medicine had the wrong model of the body. That pivot made him one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine and a central name in the New Age movement. It also put him permanently at odds with the scientific mainstream, which classes his approach to well-being, a blend of yoga, meditation, nutrition and other New Age therapies, as pseudoscience.
The output is enormous and runs in several modes at once. There are the practical self-help books, The Seven Spiritual Laws For Parents and The healing self among them. There is fiction: Buddha retells the life of the Buddha as a straightforward novel. There is a memoir, Return of the rishi. There is the debate book, War of the Worldviews, written as a two-sided argument, which is the fairest place to hear his position tested rather than declared. And there is The seven spiritual laws of superheroes, which is exactly what it sounds like.
What the credit list mostly records, though, is not the writing but the ubiquity. Chopra appears as himself in The Colbert Report, Iconoclasts, Tamron Hall, The Wheel, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics and Survivor's Guide to Prison, narrates Unity, and plays a version of himself in two comedies, Little Fockers and The Love Guru. Being recognisable enough to cast as yourself is its own achievement, and it describes what he actually built: a brand more durable than any individual book.
He is worth reading with the source in view. The prose is calm, confident and very quotable, and it is at its best on attention, habit and stress. When it reaches for quantum mechanics as an explanation, it stops being metaphor and starts making claims his training does not support.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Books (8)
Where to start with Deepak Chopra
Of the books here, The healing self is the most useful place to land first, because it stays close to the ground: sleep, stress, inflammation, habit, the parts of the argument that overlap with ordinary preventive medicine and that you can actually act on this week.
War of the Worldviews is the more interesting read, though, because it is the only title on this list where somebody pushes back. If you want to know whether the ideas hold up, read the argument rather than the sermon.
Buddha is the surprise: a plain, competently told novel that asks nothing of you philosophically. Return of the rishi is the memoir and explains the move away from hospital medicine better than any of the manifestos do. Watch The Love Guru only as evidence of how famous he became.
The core wellness books
The publishing career that made him famous, built around meditation, Ayurveda and mind-body health. Return of the Rishi is the earliest and the most autobiographical of them. Treat the science claims with scepticism and read these as what they are, which is popular spiritual writing rather than medicine.
Chopra in argument and in fiction
War of the Worldviews is the most useful book of his to read first, because it is structured as a debate with the physicist Leonard Mlodinow and the counter-argument sits on the facing page. Buddha is his novel, and the least doctrinal thing he has published.
Chopra on screen, mostly as himself
His screen credits are almost all cameos playing Deepak Chopra, which tells you how thoroughly the name became a shorthand. The Love Guru builds an entire comedy around the archetype, and the documentaries are the places where he is treated as a subject rather than a punchline.