Sources & attributions
Public-domain texts
Every classical text on this site is in the public domain in the United States and in most of the world. The English translations we use are themselves older than 1930 and have lapsed copyright everywhere.
The plain-text source of each translation comes from Project Gutenberg, the canonical digital library of public-domain literature in English. We re-typeset and re-segment the texts for screen reading; the prose itself is unchanged from the Gutenberg sources.
| Text | Translator (year) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Bhagavad Gita | Edwin Arnold (1885) | Project Gutenberg #2388 |
| Dhammapada | F. Max Müller (1881) | Project Gutenberg #2017 |
| Tao Te Ching | James Legge (1891) | Project Gutenberg #216 |
| Analects of Confucius | James Legge (1893) | Project Gutenberg #4094 |
| The Art of War | Lionel Giles (1910) | Project Gutenberg #132 |
Editorial content
All editor's notes, reading guides, children's-book reviews, and curated reading lists are original to this site. They are written by a single editor under the pen name Kumārajīva. There are no guest contributors, no syndicated content, and no machine-generated editorial text.
AI-generated content
Each chapter of every text has a separate page labeled
"Modern paraphrase". These pages are explicit AI-generated
rewrites in contemporary English of the public-domain translations.
They are produced via the Anthropic API (Claude Opus 4.7); every such
page carries a prominent banner naming the model and pointing the
reader at the original. These pages are excluded from search-engine
indexing via robots.txt so that the canonical
translations are what appears in search results.
No editorial copy elsewhere on the site is machine-generated.
Cover images
Cover images for the children's-book reviews in the Library section are reproduced from the Open Library Covers API, which serves them at modest resolution for identification purposes. Copyright in each cover image remains with the publisher of the book in question. Their display here is incidental to original editorial commentary and is consistent with standard fair-use practice for book reviews.
If you are the rights-holder of a cover image and would prefer it not appear on this site, contact us via the address listed on the about page and we will remove it.
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License
The classical texts are public domain. The editorial content on this site — reviews, guides, lists, and reading-path notes — is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license: non-commercial reuse permitted with attribution to this site.