Who I'm looking for
Someone with a PhD in religious studies, Buddhist studies, contemplative studies, or comparative philosophy — and deep reading in classical contemplative texts. Reading ability in at least one of Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Classical Chinese, or Classical Japanese, in a tradition you've actually published on. Broader range welcome, not required.
You hold both halves of the work at once: scholarly precision and lived seriousness. You've studied the texts and you've sat with them. You can tell when sati has been collapsed into "mindfulness" and lost the recollection-and-discernment that made it sati in the first place. You can name the missing half. You can read where convenience or marketing has eroded the source, and you care enough to say so.
You've also read the existing critique. Iwamura's Virtual Orientalism, the Buddhist-studies arguments that contemporary meditation apps fuel exactly the dispositions traditional practice was meant to dissolve. The role exists because I want that critique inside the project, not outside it.
What you'd work on
- Reviewing the corpus of meditation techniques the AI generates from — line by line where it matters. Flagging misattributions, syncretic blendings that compromise integrity, oversimplifications, and any place a technique has been stripped from its ethical or relational context.
- Recommending additions. Where are we silent on a tradition that should be in the corpus? Where are we leaning too hard on one school and underrepresenting others?
- Writing short lineage notes — a paragraph or two per technique — that ground each practice in the texts it actually comes from. These inform the prompts the AI runs against, and may eventually become a public archive on the site.
- Helping me see what not to do. Where would a technique we're tempted by actively betray the tradition it comes from, and what would the alternative be?
What I'll bring
- The full corpus of techniques, the system prompts the AI uses to compose meditations from them, and the freedom to mark anything in either for revision.
- A real openness to changing direction when the texts say something different than what the marketing wants to hear. I'd rather ship a smaller, honest product than a wide, syncretic one.
- Equity in the company building this, so the lineage you defend is also a lineage you have a stake in.
What I won't do
- Use your work as appropriation cover. If we shouldn't be drawing from a tradition the way we are, I want to hear it and act on it, not have your name on a footnote about it.
- Reduce the review to a checkbox or a one-time pass. The corpus is the spine of the product, and the conversation is the work.
- Pretend AI translation is a substitute for scholarship, or that a system prompt can do what a teacher does.
If you've taught or published on classical contemplative texts, send a short note with one practice in the current meditation-app market you think is most misrepresented, and what it would take to get it right.