Arts of Bodhi East Asian Buddhist art

Colophon

Published 14 May 2026

bodhi is a static site, hand-edited, open in build. This page documents the stack, the typography, the editorial architecture, and the acknowledgments.

Stack

  • Astro 5 — content-first static site generator. Markdown and MDX articles compile to plain HTML; no client JavaScript ships on standard pages.
  • Tailwind 4 — utility-first CSS framework (Vite plugin), used through a thin custom design-token layer in src/styles/.
  • Pagefind — search, indexed at build, served static. Tuned for kanji and romaji.
  • MDX — for articles that need component-level composition (image grids, embedded disambiguation tables, per-cluster layout choices).
  • Astro RSS + Astro sitemap — per-cluster RSS feeds and a build-time sitemap.

The site is statically deployed; no server runtime is involved.

Typography

Open-licensed only. No paid fonts. Four families, each with a defined role.

  • EB Garamond — display serif. SIL Open Font License 1.1. Carries article titles, cluster pillar headings, and h2 section heads where the size (22px and up) lets the historical strokes hold against a dark surface.
  • Source Serif 4 — reading-size serif. SIL Open Font License 1.1. Engineered for screens — heavier strokes than Garamond, no subpixel smear in dark mode. Used wherever a serif sits at body size: the standfirst (TLDR), figure captions, blockquotes, source notes.
  • Inter — sans-serif body and UI. SIL Open Font License 1.1. Variable axis used for fine-grain weight control. Article body, navigation, cards.
  • JetBrains Mono — chrome monospace. SIL Open Font License 1.1. Marginalia, accession numbers, dates, breadcrumbs, micro-labels — anything tabular or chrome-tier.
  • Noto Serif JP — Japanese fallback. SIL Open Font License 1.1. Renders kanji and kana natively when the primary serif lacks coverage.

Italic is held back hard. Reserved for blockquotes (whole block), markdown emphasis (foreign-language and technical terms), figure captions, editorial asides, and source notes. Ledes, titles, body prose, and chrome labels are upright.

Colour

The dark sumi room is bodhi’s identity. Achromatic chrome — neutral greys at OKLCH calibrated lightness steps — carries the UI; per-cluster hairline accents identify clusters without colour-banding the surface. A Kinpaku light theme is available as an accessibility hatch; the dark theme is the default and the brand.

Editorial architecture

The site is organised in four layers.

  • /raw/ — primary-source ingest (museum APIs, scholarly bibliographies, ColBase, exhibition catalogues, tax-documented collections).
  • /wiki/ — the working knowledge base: entity primers, candidate material, time-sensitive ledger, source-watch list. Nothing here is published; it is the editor’s bench, not the surface.
  • /content/ — published articles, disambiguation tables, entity primers, digests, and these pages. Researched, written, and signed off by the named editor before publication.
  • /src/ — Astro components, layouts, and routing. The published surface.

Research and source-triage tooling assists the editor across the first two layers, converting primary sources into the structured working knowledge base on a scheduled cadence. The editorial judgment, the prose, the source floor, and the final sign-off are the named editor’s; nothing reaches /content/ without that review. The full editorial contract — voice, observation discipline, source floor, image rights, never-do — is in the public agent-os/ operating manual.

What does not run

  • No client-side analytics. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Hotjar.
  • No third-party tracking. No retargeting, no behavioural personalisation, no recommendation engine.
  • No advertisements. No sponsored editorial.
  • No comments, no user accounts, no paywall.
  • No service worker, no offline cache. The site is static and trivially cacheable upstream.

A single first-party event log records page hits (path + referrer + user-agent class) for traffic-shape understanding. No cookies, no IP storage, no cross-page session reconstruction.

Acknowledgments

bodhi is built against the standing work of many open-access institutions and scholars. The single largest debts:

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the 2017 Open Access decision and the API.
  • Cleveland Museum of Art for the 2019 Open Access decision and the Open Access JSON.
  • The National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan, for ColBase and e-Museum.
  • JAANUS (Japanese Architecture and Art Net Users System) for the terminological backbone.
  • Wikimedia Commons and the photographers whose own-work uploads populate the public-domain image pool.

The editorial standards owe deep readings to Cynthea Bogel, E. Dale Saunders, Hisashi Mōri, John Rosenfield, Mark Blum, Robert Sharf, Donald McCallum, and Sherry Fowler — the named scholarly anchors most often cited across the corpus.

Source

bodhi’s source code, content collections, and editorial standards are public. The repository, including the agent-os operating manual, the editorial pipeline configuration, and the wiki working knowledge base, serves as the canonical record of how the site is built and maintained.