In the brief Foreword, Benjamin Hoff explains the impetus of The Tao of Pooh. Hoff and others were discussing the Great Masters of Wisdom one day when he and another person began to argue. The other man said that all of the Great Masters came from the east, while Hoff claimed that some also came from the west. To prove his point, Hoff reads the man a passage from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. After hearing the passage, the man says that it sounds like Winnie-the-Pooh, not Taoism. Hoff counters that they are the same thing. This incident sparks Hoff’s interest in writing a book that uses Winnie-the-Pooh, the classic children’s book, to explain Taoism.