How to Support the Radical Buddhism Project

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 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.