About this site

This is a reference for Zen as a matter of record: who the people were, what they wrote, which school counts them, and who taught whom. It is written for anyone, in plain English, and it uses Buddhist and Zen words freely by explaining each one the first time it appears.

It is made by people who care about getting this right, and who would rather it be judged by its sources than by their names. It belongs to no school or organization. Its pages are drafted and checked with AI, in a way described below.

How facts are sourced

Every date, every attribution and every line of transmission on this site cites at least one source, listed at the foot of the entry. Where the tradition's record and the historical record differ, the entry says so and gives both: a link is marked traditional when it rests on the tradition's own later accounts, disputed when sources disagree, and by proxy when a transmission passed through a third person. Nothing is decided on the reader's behalf.

Entries begin life unchecked and say so at the foot. A separate review compares each one against the sources it cites before the note changes to "checked"; what that review is, is set out below. Living people are described from public record only; see Teachers for what that means.

How this site is made

The pages here are drafted by AI and checked by programs and by AI reviewers, with people stepping in where neither can reach. We say so plainly because a reader deciding whether to trust a date should know how it got here.

Each entry is drafted in the site's voice from the standard reference works, with its sources named. Before it is marked checked it goes through a fixed sequence. Programs first, for everything that can be settled by comparison: quoted passages are matched character by character against the Taishō and Zokuzōkyō canons and the line where each begins is given beside it; dates are checked against lifespans; every citation must resolve; the rules on living people and on copyright are enforced by the build itself. Then frontier language models, each given the source text and one job: whether the prose holds to the house voice, whether each claim appears in the source cited, whether every citation is real and placed, whether anything is reproduced that the rights don't allow. A final adversarial review has one mandate: to find what the others missed, and to strike any finding that does not stand up. Only then does the foot of the page change to checked, and it says when and against what.

Where a claim rests on a book no program can open, the review looks for the same claim in an open primary source and cites that instead. Where it finds none, the entry says so and a person reads the book.

This is not the usual way AI is used to write pages, and speed is not the point. The point is to make visible what sits in sources most readers will never open, and to get it right.

Texts and copyright

Copyright belongs to an edition, not to a work. A thirteenth-century Chinese text is free for anyone to read and copy; a translation of it made in 1977 is not. So each text on this site lists its editions, and each edition carries one of four labels:

• Public domain — the full text is given or linked in full.
• Open licence — published under an open licence; given in full with the attribution the licence asks for.
• Free to read online — in copyright, but the rights holder offers it free online. We link to their copy.
• In copyright — not reproduced. We give the facts of publication, our own summary, and where to find it.

Summaries of in-copyright works are written here, never copied from publishers. Translations made for this site are labelled as such and shown beside the original; they are checked against it the same way as everything else before they appear, and claim to be nothing more than translations. Copyright terms differ by country; each edition records the basis for its label and the date it was checked. When we don't know, we treat a work as in copyright.

Reusing this site's own work

The summaries, glosses, translations and data made for this site are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence: use them, with credit, under the same terms. Texts by others keep their own rights, as labelled.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, say so. A source helps; a page name is enough.