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How a case is made

Every case renders the same seven parts, always in this order: a verdict strip; a confrontation block (Blyth's exact words facing the canonical Chinese, the disputed term in cinnabar, with a character-by-character gloss); the dictionary's band (the attested reading verbatim, with the entry's Explanation or occurrence-line where the charge rests on it); the knew-better row (Blyth's own faithful rendering of the same term or injunction, with its page); a literal reading; the alteration (what the change does, capped at 150 words, the shortest section by design); and a fairness footer with the steelman and check-it-yourself links.

The knew-better row is the signature element, and it is Blyth-specific. Where Suzuki's site set a translator consensus beside him, this site sets Blyth beside himself: the same hand rendering the same word faithfully elsewhere. On the pages where no such rendering exists, a corroboration stands in: the sibling entry, or the uniform band.

What counts as evidence

The authority is an evidence-first Zen dictionary built from named-master citations in the CBETA corpus. Every attested band on this site is that dictionary's verbatim output, produced by its grounding tool and pasted without paraphrase; the build checks each band string against the source dossier and refuses any that was retyped rather than transcribed. The dictionary is authority only where it has an entry: a divergence is Blyth's English outside the entry's attested band, or a construal the entry's own occurrence-line forbids. No entry ever meant a candidate, never a charge.

We inherit the dictionary's hard rule: no unattributed interpretation. When a case says what a phrase means, that reading is the entry's, attested, never our private insight.

The three dispositions

Every load-bearing term, across the Mumonkan's 48 cases and the seven further works of the oeuvre now audited, passed through the grounding tool and received one of three dispositions. Faithful: Blyth's English sits inside the attested band, sometimes word for word against the dictionary's own preferred target. Grounded divergence: his English leaves the band, or construes the term as the entry's occurrence-line forbids. Candidate: no entry existed yet, so nothing could be asserted. In the Mumonkan the audit filed fourteen dict-entry requests to close the candidates; all fourteen entries were built from the frozen corpus, independently audited, and installed, then every held term was re-run. Eight flipped to grounded divergence, six resolved to faithful. The oeuvre pass ran the same discipline against the current dictionary, so terms once held as candidates, the awakening-word 悟 among them, are re-run as grounded where an entry now stands. Out-of-scope narration is never counted; each work's base is only its in-scope, gradable renderings.

A note on stature

Blyth's Mumonkan is a serious, learned, frequently beautiful book by a man who read the Chinese, weighed alternatives on the page, and rendered most of the collection faithfully. Where a coarse koan invites a euphemism, Blyth prints 乾屎橛 as “a shit-wiping stick” at full strength. The divergences below matter precisely because the translator was good enough to know better, and in the strongest cases demonstrably did: on the flagship he translates 莫作虛無會, do not take 無 as nothingness, and then takes it as exactly that. Diminishing him would diminish the point. This is a comparison, given him at his full stature.

The tally, book by book

These totals are not typed into the page. They are computed at build time from the per-book coverage ledgers (content/coverage/*.json), each book kept on its own base and never blended into a single rate. Change a verdict in a ledger and every total here moves with it.

The symmetric audit

It would be easy to flag Blyth's imported vocabulary and quietly import our own. So the standard is symmetric: the dictionary this site treats as authority is held to the very words it flags in Blyth, and its bands are checked, at build time, against the frozen corpus that produced them. The same import-word lint that scans Blyth's alterations for “ego,” “soul,” “Godhead,” and “the Unconscious” runs on this site's own prose at every build, this page included; those words may appear only inside a quotation or an explicit, listed refutation context, such as Blyth's own “condition of the soul” on the Mu page. The site holds the line it asks Blyth to hold.

How this grows

The site folds in the rest of Blyth's oeuvre without a rebuild, and now does: eight audited works ship together. The denominator, the family rosters, and the fairness page are all computed from one coverage ledger per audited work. The Mumonkan's is the full 48-case verdict table; seven further works, from the 1942 Zen in English Literature to the Nangaku history and Games Zen Masters Play, sit beside it, each on its own base. Adding another audited work means dropping a sibling coverage file: every total recomputes and the per-work base stays separate, never a blended number that hides the base. The five families are data: a new finding declares a family key, and a new family is a data addition, not a template change. Adding a new case is adding one content file, nothing else. And the candidate-to-grounded lifecycle is preserved: a case may carry a candidate disposition with a dict-request, and when the entry lands it is re-adjudicated by editing its own frontmatter, exactly as the fourteen 2026-07-21 entries were.

Fair use

Quotation here is for criticism and comparison: the classic fair-use posture. Blyth's Mumonkan (Zen and Zen Classics vol. 4, Hokuseido Press, 1966) is in copyright, so it is quoted only in minimal spans, well under 100 words per case, always with full attribution: work, edition, year, printed page. The canonical Chinese is CBETA's, credited per its license, with a per-case link into the ReadZen reader at the exact line. This is a design commitment, not legal advice.

Corrections

A site about textual accuracy must be conspicuously correctable. If you think a call here is wrong, raise it on r/zen or open an issue on the ReadZen GitHub. Corrections are published with the same prominence as the original claim, and every case carries a visible revision history. Mild is marked mild; the steelman is mandatory; the fairness set keeps its prominence.

Who and what is behind it

The evidence base is the ReadZen project: an evidence-first Zen dictionary, the CBETA Chinese Buddhist corpus, and the tooling that indexes them. This site is a node of the ReadZen network; see the footer. It borrows the dictionary's discipline wholesale, including the rule that depth means more attributed evidence, never more essay.