Title Rethinking Fa Bu Qing Chuan ("The Dharma Should Not Be Transmitted Lightly"): Knowledge Propagation Ethics and Implications for Open Knowledge Platforms

A doctrine of restricted transmission is stated across several traditions and is compactly formulated in the eight-character maxim fa bu qing chuan, dao bu jian mai, holding that the dharma is not transmitted lightly and the way is not sold cheaply. The doctrine appears to stand in opposition to the commitments on which open knowledge platforms, open source practice and the open scholarly record are built, and the opposition is ordinarily settled by dismissing one side. This paper asks what the doctrine asserts, what in it survives examination, who is competent to determine whether a transmission should occur, and which requirements on a transmitter are compatible with open knowledge practice. Transmission is treated as an operation on a system already in some state, and the doctrine's single notion of readiness is separated into representational, dynamical and relational conditions, which differ in who is able to remedy their failure. The readiness assessment is then found to be administered by the party a finding of unreadiness relieves, filtered in its common implementation by a capacity uncorrelated with the disposition it is meant to detect, and insulated from the objection of the party it concerns. A thesis about knowledge whose acquisition consists in a reorganisation of the receiver is retained, and separated from the claim, common to the tradition and unsupported by it, that the reorganisation requires the receiver's suffering. The position advanced replaces the judgement of readiness with three requirements on the transmitter's own conduct: an account of what a transmission affords, of the parties a chosen setting distributes it to, and of the reception failures a chosen form invites; continued attention to what follows; and retention of the means of revising the terms. A justificatory burden is allocated where effects are substantially irreversible, symmetrically across withholding and transmitting. The rights a transmitter retains are treated on a distinction between dominion and custody, so that a commitment against possessing what one has produced constrains authority over its future and leaves intact the standing required to act against exploitation; and the paper states plainly that no course available, including transmitting nothing, supplies a guarantee against misuse. The harms at issue are extended to those arising under unbounded propagation, among them occupation of a subject by an early artifact whose terms obstruct its own repair, and licensing, staged release and administered disclosure intervals are examined against them. The paper advances no further candidate for a single correct account of when knowledge may be passed on, offering a common language in which a doctrine formed under one set of conditions and instruments developed under another may be compared; and it states its own terms together with the conditions under which they would be shown to be mistaken.