About

Dharma & Dao is a small library of the Indian and Chinese classics, in the best public-domain English translations. The texts are old; the translations are old enough to be free; the reading should be new.

The site is built and edited under the name Kumārajīva, after the 4th–5th-century Indo-Iranian monk who translated the core of Mahāyāna Buddhism from Sanskrit into Chinese. The reading recommendations, translation comparisons, and editor's reviews on this site are one reader's curation, with a particular taste: for the public-domain translations that taught the English-speaking world how to read these books, plainly told, without softening the places where a modern translation would serve a first-time reader better.

Every text here is in the public domain in the United States and in most of the world. You may read, copy, redistribute, and remix any of it without permission. Where a translation is not the most beautiful modern rendering — and several aren't — we say so in the editor's note for that text, and we point you at the modern ones in copyright.

The text pages themselves are unadorned: no commentary footnotes, no comments, no analytics, no third-party scripts. The editorial pieces — these reading guides and the library reviews — carry Kumārajīva's name.

For where the texts come from, how cover images are licensed, and how AI-generated paraphrases are labeled, see sources & attributions.