The Center acquired a set of rare translation notes of The Record of Linji (Rinzai Roku) in the summer of 2017. These translation notes were the collaborative work of Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Philip Yampolsky, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, Iriya Yoshitaka and Yanagida Seizan, who participated in a translation project in the 1950s. The documents are currently preserved in the Center library.
The Center recently has finished digitizing the physical copies in collaboration with the UA Libraries, the Center for Digital Humanities, and undergraduate and graduate students. A preliminary investigation of these precious documents shows that they will refresh our understanding of The Record of Linji and have a significant impact on the studies of classical Chan texts. The fifteen binders contain multilinguistic printed texts, diagrams of sources, maps of Chan monasteries and handwritten notes. They also show how an East Asian classic can be translated into English, making them highly valuable as teaching tools for translation studies.