Sources

Suzuki's works, as cited

Editions matter: pagination differs across printings, so every case pins the specific edition and page. In-copyright works are quoted only in minimal fair-use spans (see Method).

• Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series Luzac & Co., 1927 (later Rider). Source for cases B1, D1. public domain
• The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind ed. Christmas Humphreys, Rider, 1949. Source for the flagship (C1) and A1. in copyright
• Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series Rider, 1933. The E1 shit-stick material (cited here via the Essentials reprint to avoid the Second-Series pagination caveat). in copyright
• Essays in Zen Buddhism, Third Series Rider, 1934. A1 corroboration; the correctly-rendered donkey-stake line (Fairness). in copyright
• The Essentials of Zen Buddhism ed. Bernard Phillips, Rider, 1962/63. Anthology; quotations cite the underlying work and the anthology page. Source for E1. in copyright
• An Introduction to Zen Buddhism Rider, 1934. Corroborates B1/D1; appendix G2. in copyright
• Manual of Zen Buddhism Rider, 1935. Appendix A5, H4, I2. in copyright
• Studies in Zen Rider, 1955. Appendix I4; second-wave cases. in copyright
• Zen and Japanese Culture Bollingen / Princeton, 1959. The Blue Cliff Record 57 control (Fairness). in copyright

Comparison translators

Every translator whose rendering appears in a consensus row, credited in full, not just a surname in a table. Consensus rows are spot-checked against the physical books before a case ships.

• John Whitfield Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (translation). Renders the six-window parable “house.”
• Andy Ferguson Zen’s Chinese Heritage. “Room.”
• Thomas Cleary lamp-record and koan translations; Unlocking the Zen Kōan; The Sutra of Hui-neng.
• Gerry Shishin Wick The Book of Equanimity. “Room.”
• Anzan Hoshin Cases for Meditation. “Room / house.”
• Philip Yampolsky The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. “Mind”; “no stand.”
• Red Pine (Bill Porter) The Platform Sutra. “Mind”; “no stand.”
• Urs App Master Yunmen. Restores “shit-stick.”
• Katsuki Sekida Two Zen Classics. “Dried shit-stick.”

The primary corpus & the dictionary

The primary sources are the Chinese Buddhist canon as published by CBETA (the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association), specifically the Zen corpus in the ReadZen `xml-p5` build. The counter-evidence (which witnesses use which characters) comes from the evidence-first Zen dictionary, a ReadZen project that indexes named-master citations across that corpus. Every witness row on this site is a projection of a dictionary entry, not fresh scholarship; the site links back to the entry.

• CBETA Chinese Buddhist canon The primary sources are the CBETA digital canon (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association): the Taishō, Manji (X), Jiaxing (J), Zhonghua (C) and related collections, used under the CBETA licence. Each witness on this site links into the ReadZen reader at its exact line, where the passage can be read in Chinese and, where available, English.
• The evidence-first Zen dictionary Browse it at readzen.pages.dev/#/dict: 3,655 entries, built from named-master citations. It is this site’s witness base and the audit standard it holds itself to; every case links back to its entry.

CBETA license & credit

CBETA texts are used under the CBETA license, which permits free use for non-commercial and academic purposes with attribution. Source text © CBETA; markup and corpus build © the CBETA and ReadZen projects. Each witness on this site carries a direct link into the ReadZen reader at its CBETA locus, so the reader can open and verify the passage in its full context. Suzuki quotations are the property of their respective publishers and are reproduced here in minimal spans for the purpose of criticism and comparison.