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.

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 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. No commentary bylines, no comments, no analytics, no third-party scripts.