Zen: Buddhist Sutras

With gratitude to Zen teacher Lin Gu-fang for his guidance and teaching. To share the Dharma, all four books are free to read and to hear read aloud, forever, with free translation into English, Japanese, German, French, and Spanish, so that more people around the world may come to know Zen and the good it brings.

One quiet shelf, four classics.

The Heart Sutra — Xuanzang's Chinese, all 260 characters of it, in the seven sections of Fazang's Tang-dynasty outline. This one is free in full, including every editorial explanation and five-language translation. The Diamond Sutra — Kumārajīva's classical Chinese, 32 chapters, 129 passages. The Dhammapada — a verse anthology in its third-century Chinese translation, 39 chapters, 758 stanzas by the chapter headings' own count. The Platform Sutra — the recorded teaching of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan, compiled by his disciple Fahai: the one work written in China that Chinese Buddhism honors with the title "sutra."

All four set in a serif face on a quiet, paper-toned page.

EDITORIAL EXPLANATIONS — INCLUDED, NOT GENERATED LIVE
Every passage in all four books includes a fixed Traditional Chinese editorial text: a faithful rendering, a fluent modern version, and explanations of key Buddhist terms. Where more than one reading is reasonable, the principal reading is retained and the ambiguity is stated. Nothing is added merely to force a doctrinal conclusion. In English, the explanation panel shows the human-edited translation of the passage together with notes on its key terms, translated from the Chinese editorial text with AI assistance and then reviewed — and labeled as such. Everything is included in the app and works offline on any device.

FIVE-LANGUAGE TRANSLATION — FREE AND UNLIMITED
Read any passage in English, Japanese, German, French, or Spanish. All four books have fixed, human-edited translations — no network and no special device needed. Terms follow each book's own source — Sanskrit for the Diamond Sutra, Pali for the Dhammapada; the Platform Sutra's Chan vocabulary is rendered by sense, never by invented transliteration.

EVERY EDITION, FULLY DOCUMENTED
The Diamond Sutra's main text follows the Ming–Qing received edition, with all 58 variants against Jiang Weinong's collated edition marked passage by passage — editorial fact. The Dhammapada and the Platform Sutra are built from public-domain texts, proofread character by character. The Heart Sutra takes only the public-domain stream of characters — the punctuation and division are our own — and is checked against the full quotation in chapter 19 of Journey to the West: 260 characters each, differing in exactly one. Every source and every editorial judgment is laid out under About This Edition in each book.

READ ALOUD
Read one passage, or play a whole chapter or a whole book straight through; stop midway and it picks up where you left off. Uses the iOS system voices — pick yours under Reading Voice in the app's settings. Older devices welcome.

DESIGNED WITH RESTRAINT
· No ads, no account, no data collection
· For iPhone and iPad
· No live AI generation anywhere in the app; the origin of the translated term notes is stated on screen

BOOK BY BOOK
The Heart Sutra is free in full — nothing to buy. Each of the others is subscribed to or bought outright on its own — mix freely; canceling one never affects another. Or unlock all paid books at once. Unlocking a book gives access to all of its fixed editorial explanations; reading, listening, and five-language translation remain free. Each book’s complete explanations can be tried free for seven days from its first opening. Subscriptions are billed to your Apple Account, renew 24 hours before each period ends, and can be canceled anytime in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions.

Terms of Use (standard EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy policy: https://sayhow.app/diamond

May each reading be a moment of turning inward.