About the Radical Buddhism Project

Mission, Aims, and Scope

The Radical Buddhist Project (RBP) is an independent digital humanities initiative functioning as a dual-purpose scholarly resource: a comprehensive text archive and a contextual encyclopedia. The project is dedicated to recovering, preserving, and analyzing the historical intersections of Buddhist doctrine with radical socio-political thought.

For the purposes of this archive and encyclopedia, "radical Buddhism" refers specifically to the conceptual and practical convergence of Buddhism with left-wing political philosophies, such as Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, as well as Buddhist involvement in anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and radical social justice movements such as Dalit emancipation.

The primary curatorial priority of the RBP is the religious and political landscape of early- to mid-20th century Asia. While the archive remains open to historical and geographic exceptions, including contemporary developments, its core resources are systematically channeled into preserving and translating the writings of monastics and lay thinkers and activists operating within this specific twentieth-century window.

Beyond acting as a repository for raw text, the RBP provides encyclopedic and contextual data focusing on country profiles and biographical profiles of individual radical Buddhists, including curated bibliographies of key secondary literature.

The Editorial and Peer-Review Model

To ensure citation reliability for global researchers, librarians, and educators, the RBP does not utilize an anonymous, crowd-sourced editing structure. The wiki is a controlled-access environment restricted to verified contributors.

The Editor-in-Chief and the Managing Editor share joint administrative responsibility for managing a rigorous, collaborative review workflow. The editors actively source external area-studies experts, specialized philologists, and fluent native speakers to audit transcribed source texts, verify linguistic nuances in English translations, and cross-reference encyclopedic profiles.

To maintain complete academic honesty, all materials on the platform feature a transparent editorial status marker. Any newly published translation, raw source text, or biographical page that has not yet undergone formal peer verification by external area experts or linguistic auditors will be explicitly marked with an "unreviewed" or similar banner. Once the auditing process is complete, the page is upgraded to an unmarked, certified status.

Governance and Institutional Independence

The RBP is an editorially independent, autonomous project. While hosted and developed independently to ensure long-term archive stability, it maintains strong collaborative ties with academic researchers globally.

The Core Team

The day-to-day survival and baseline maintenance of the project relies entirely on a small, three-person core team, with the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor sharing joint responsibility for the project's mission and direction as co-founders:

• Editor-in-Chief: James Mark Shields. Focuses primarily on external representation and the academic peer-review network, with a lighter day-to-day editorial load by design.
• Managing Editor: Lajos Brons. Primarily handles day-to-day editorial work — content generation, archival collection, and gatekeeping — and co-manages the external peer-review network.
• Technical Administrator: Adrian Amora. Manages the digital infrastructure, executes server and database maintenance, and oversees software-level customizations across the MediaWiki and phpBB platforms.

Advisory Board

The Radical Buddhist Project is currently forming its international advisory board.

Open Access Policy

The RBP operates under a strict adherence to the Platinum/Diamond Open Access standard. Scholarship must be universally accessible. The entire encyclopedia and text archive are completely free to read, with no paywalls, login barriers, or commercial advertisements.

All content on this site — encyclopedia articles, country and biographical profiles, formatting, and archived source texts and translations — is made available for free reading, citation, and quotation under normal academic quotation standards. It may not, however, be copied, mirrored, or republished elsewhere without permission. See Copyright Policy for the site's full terms of use, and Copyrights of Republished and Translated Texts for how the RBP assesses the copyright status of hosted historical material, including texts whose rights holders could not be identified.

Support and Project Sustainability

The RBP is entirely non-profit and does not possess a traditional corporate hierarchy, non-profit legal status (NPO), or a centralized institutional bank account. The project's survival and expansion depend on two distinct pillars of communal and academic support.

1. Contributor Collaboration

Scholars, translators, and area specialists can support the project directly by applying to join our closed circle of verified Wiki Editors, volunteering their expertise to translate rare texts, transcribe physical source materials, or peer-review existing draft pages.

Crucially, project contribution is not limited to career academics. Fluent and native speakers of Asian languages who are willing to cross-check transcribed digital texts against photographic scans of the original print editions to catch character errors, typos, or rendering bugs are exceptionally welcome and highly valued partners in this project.

2. Direct Funding of Core Curatorial Labor

The majority of the encyclopedia content, archival digitization, and baseline translation work on the RBP is executed directly by the Managing Editor, working as an independent, self-employed academic translator and proofreader. As with any small non-institutional project, this labor is fundamentally constrained by available hours.

The project maintains an official [LINK T.B.A. Patreon Page]. We see direct community support as our long-term sustainability model: every pledge or subscription offsets the Managing Editor's freelance hours, freeing up time for encyclopedia writing, text digitization, and translation. We want to be transparent, however, that crowd-funding of this kind tends to build slowly, often over a period of years, and cannot by itself guarantee a fast pace of early content growth.

For this reason, the RBP will also seek institutional or grant funding where possible, particularly in its early stages. The goal of such funding would be to help the project reach a decent baseline of published content more quickly than community support alone would allow — effectively kick-starting the archive so that its long-term growth, sustained by direct community support, has more to build on from the outset.