Translation was never the work of one quiet scholar with a dictionary. It has always been a checked, collaborative craft — and it still is here.
I.An old craft, not a solitary one
The Chinese Buddhist canon that this site draws on — the Taishō edition, 大正藏 — exists because of a translation institution the Tang dynasty perfected: the translation bureau (譯場). By the height of Xuánzàng's era, a single sūtra could pass through as many as a dozen distinct roles before it was considered finished:
| Role | Job |
|---|---|
| Chief Translator 譯主 | Read and expounded the Sanskrit; held final authority on meaning |
| Doctrinal Verifier 證義 | Checked the reading against established doctrine, in dialogue with the Chief Translator |
| Textual Verifier 證文 | Listened to the Sanskrit recitation, checked it against the manuscript |
| Scribe 筆受 | Turned the spoken meaning into a written Chinese draft |
| Editor 綴文 | Arranged that draft into proper Chinese sentence order |
| Cross-checker 參譯 | Compared Chinese against Sanskrit, sometimes back-translating to test accuracy |
| Reviser 刊定 | Cut redundancy, tightened the text without losing meaning |
| Literary Polisher 潤文 | Refined the prose style — often a court scholar, not a monk |
| Imperial Supervisor 監護大使 | Oversaw resources and gave the project standing |
The point of this machinery was never ceremony. It was error control. No single mind — not even Xuánzàng's — was trusted alone with a text that would be chanted, studied, and relied on for a thousand years. The name on a sūtra's colophon represents an institution of checks, not one person's certainty.
II.What happens at Ru-Yi, step by step
- Source. The Chinese text is the Taishō canon (大正藏) as preserved by CBETA — the standard modern critical edition, public domain, the same source scholars cite.
- Draft. Claude Code, an AI coding assistant made by Anthropic, produces a first rendering of the Chinese into English, sentence by sentence, cross-referenced against any existing published translation where one exists.
- Doctrinal review. Luke Lin checks that draft against the Chinese, against Chinese and English commentary, and against the wider canon. Where a term is genuinely contested among translators, the reading guide says so and explains the choice — it isn't silently resolved and hidden.
- Publication as a working edition. The page goes live dated, not declared final. Revisions are tracked in the site's version history and made openly, not quietly.
III.Where the AI sits in the old division of labor
Mapped onto the Tang bureau's roles, honestly:
| Tang role | On this site |
|---|---|
| Scribe + Editor + Cross-checker 筆受・綴文・參譯 | Claude Code — first rendering, sentence-level accuracy checks, readable English phrasing |
| Chief Translator + Doctrinal Verifier 譯主・證義 | Luke Lin — final meaning, doctrinal judgment, what gets published under Ru-Yi's name |
| Reviser 刊定 | Open revision history in place of a second court pass |
IV.What this is, and isn't
These are not authorized translations issued by a monastic order or an ordination lineage. They are a doorway for readers who don't read Chinese — a way in, not a substitute for a teacher, and not the last word on a difficult passage. Where the tradition itself holds open questions, these pages try to show the question rather than paper over it.
Found something that looks wrong?
Tell us which text and which line. We'll show our reasoning, or fix it — either way, in the open. Every page here is a working edition, the way it always was.
On the Tang translation bureau: Zànníng's 《宋高僧傳》 (Song Biographies of Eminent Monks) is the classical source for this system's roles and history.