As editor of Plain Dharma, my job was to make sure the teachings stay the Buddha’s, and that the words make sense to a modern ear. The first English draft came from Claude Opus, working directly from the Pāli. I went through it line by line, weighing each word or phrase against what Claude told me the Pāli meant, and sometimes checking the standard translations too. The whole time I kept asking whether my friends, my wife, my mom, and people I met along the way would understand what was meant, and would enjoy reading it.
Background
I grew up in New York and studied East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, where I first tried to read the suttas, cramming them the night before exams. At 19 I interrupted my studies to move to China, and I stayed for eleven years, going back and forth to finish my degree.
Along the way I studied at Peking University, Beijing Institute of Technology, and Kunming University, where I learned Classical Chinese well enough to (barely) read it, and took a summer at Harvard studying travel writing. I taught English for five years, and learned the Chinese for every word I taught my students. I worked as a translator, did some translation work for Harper’s Magazine, and became fluent in Mandarin. It was in China that I met my wife, Yan.
Though I speak English, Chinese, some Indonesian, Singlish, JavaScript, and SQL, I never became a scholar of any language. What I took away was a method: read the original closely, understand what it meant to the people who first heard it, then find the nearest words in your own language that carry the same meaning. The suttas began as an oral tradition and were only later written down by monks, so I took the liberty of translating them back toward the spoken word.
I’ve spent 25 years building software companies across Asia, from Beijing to Dhaka. Along the way I lived in Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Bali. I live in Chiang Mai now, surrounded by temples. By day I train teams to build with AI and invest through AimHuge Holdings.
Why I published Plain Dharma
I kept going back to the Buddha’s words: in college, in Bali, in San Francisco, in Chiang Mai. Every time, the stiff language turned me away. “Thus have I heard” made it sound like a god being worshipped, not a teacher being read. The dharma reached me anyway, through D.T. Suzuki, Kerouac, Thich Nhat Hanh, temple murals, and the occasional deep breath. The scripture never did.
So one night, awake at 3 a.m., I asked a plain question: what did he actually say? By sunrise I had read all six teachings in one sitting and understood them for the first time. Plain Dharma is that reading, worked over line by line against the Pāli until it holds up.
How I edited Plain Dharma
The drafts came fast. The editing was slow. Every term got the same treatment: fetch the Pāli, lay out its range of meanings, and choose from the real range rather than whatever the machine agreed to. The three poisons, moha, rāga, dosa, are usually Englished as delusion, greed, and hatred. I kept asking until I got to confusion, wanting, and anger: plain words everyone has felt. Most of the finishing happened on a flight from Chiang Mai to Surabaya, pen on a printed proof, reading along with the audiobook.
This is not a substitute for a scholarly translation. If a teaching here moves you, read the same passage by Bhikkhu Bodhi or Thanissaro Bhikkhu next. Plain Dharma is a starting point.
The full story is on How this was made.
Elsewhere
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