Publishing in the calendar

Who can publish

Communities that are already in the calendar. The editor gives each community its id — a short name in Latin letters, written in the field source. If your community is not in the calendar yet, apply first.

Apply

What you can publish

• Events — drubchens, retreats, seminars, teachings, pujas: dates, times, place, a short text and a link.
• Anniversaries of masters and lineage days. You give them once, by Tibetan date — month and day — and they recur every year: the calendar works out the western date itself.
• Daily words — a quote, an instruction or a reminder, on a given date or every year on a Tibetan date. A quote always names its source. There can be many of them, even one every day, but no more than three on one date.

Any entry may carry one picture, with your confirmation of the rights and a credit line.

The rules

The calendar exists for practice, so the rules are simple and strict:

1. Only authentic Dharma content: practice, teaching, the life of the community.
2. No advertising, prices, sales, requests for donations or sponsorship, politics, criticism of other teachers or traditions, or promises of healing.
3. Nothing invented: no dates, biographies, quotes, attributions or titles.
4. Every quote names its author, and the book and translator when there are any.
5. Your own texts in your own languages. We never machine-translate; a machine translation you made yourselves is published only if the editor approves it.
6. No private contact details in public texts.

Tibetan dates

Give the month and day as your lineage keeps them. We work out the western date every year ourselves, by the Phugpa (Men-Tsee-Khang) reckoning, as for the whole calendar: a skipped day’s observance moves to the next day, and of a doubled day the first is kept.

Sometimes a month is doubled. For such a year, say in leapMonth which half your community keeps: first — the first half (the default), second — the second, both — both.

Do not convert a Tibetan date into a western one, and do not add a year — neither for anniversaries nor for yearly entries. The checker shows which days they fall on in the coming years.

If your lineage follows another almanac (Tsurphu, for example), publish those days as events with dates.

Losar, the four Düchen, Guru Rinpoche days, full and new moons are already in the calendar: do not add them as anniversaries, even when your community calls such a day a lineage day. Publish what the community does on it as an event or a yearly daily word.

A practice the community keeps every month on a lunar day (every full moon, say) is either events, one per date, with the dates from your almanac, or twelve yearly daily words — months 1 to 12, the same day — each with leapMonth: both, so that in a doubled month it appears in both halves.

The file, step by step

The file is JSON in UTF-8, up to 2 MB. Name it id-date.json, for example example-2026-11-02.json. It may hold no fields that are not in the format: most of them would be typos, and what they hold would be lost without anyone noticing.

Public texts are written by language: { "en": "…", "uk": "…" }. Every language of a text must be in languages or machineTranslated, and the entry’s own language is required. Plain text only, no HTML.

The easiest start is the template, template.v1.json: it has one entry of each kind, and everything you need to replace begins with REPLACE:. Replace the sample values too — your-community-id, you@example.org, the https://example.org/… addresses, your-picture.jpg; the template’s dates, times and Tibetan month and day are only examples. The checker catches REPLACE: and these samples, but not the dates: check those yourself.

{
  "$schema": "https://www.firstbuddha.space/sangha/contribute/schema.v1.json",
  "format": "firstbuddha-sangha-contribution",
  "version": 1,
  "source": "example",
  "community": {
    "name": "Example Dharma Centre",
    "website": "https://example.org"
  },
  "contact": {
    "name": "Name Surname",
    "email": "office@example.org",
    "role": "Secretary"
  },
  "confirm": {
    "authorised": true,
    "rights": true
  },
  "languages": [
    "en",
    "uk"
  ],
  "zone": "Europe/Kyiv",
  "entries": [ … ]
}

{
  "type": "event",
  "id": "2026-tara-retreat",
  "kind": "ritual",
  "title": {
    "en": "Green Tara retreat",
    "uk": "Ретрит Зеленої Тари"
  },
  "summary": {
    "en": "Three days of Tara practice with the resident lama.",
    "uk": "Три дні практики Тари з ламою громади."
  },
  "location": {
    "en": "Main shrine hall",
    "uk": "Головна святиня"
  },
  "allDay": false,
  "startDate": "2026-12-04",
  "endDate": "2026-12-06",
  "startTime": "09:00",
  "endTime": "17:00",
  "daily": true,
  "registration": "required",
  "url": "https://example.org/tara-2026",
  "image": {
    "file": "tara-retreat.jpg",
    "credit": "Photo: Example Dharma Centre",
    "rightsConfirmed": true,
    "alt": {
      "en": "Statue of Green Tara on the shrine",
      "uk": "Статуя Зеленої Тари на вівтарі"
    }
  }
}

{
  "type": "anniversary",
  "id": "founding-teacher-parinirvana",
  "title": {
    "en": "Parinirvana of our founding teacher",
    "uk": "Паринірвана засновника громади"
  },
  "tibetan": {
    "month": 3,
    "day": 10
  }
}

{
  "type": "note",
  "id": "2026-12-01-quote",
  "kind": "quote",
  "date": "2026-12-01",
  "text": {
    "en": "The words of the quote, exactly as they are published.",
    "uk": "Слова цитати — так, як їх надруковано."
  },
  "attribution": {
    "author": {
      "en": "Name of the teacher",
      "uk": "Імʼя вчителя"
    },
    "work": {
      "en": "Title of the book",
      "uk": "Назва книжки"
    },
    "ref": "p. 12"
  }
}

{
  "file": "tara-retreat.jpg",
  "credit": "Photo: Example Dharma Centre",
  "rightsConfirmed": true,
  "alt": {
    "en": "Statue of Green Tara on the shrine",
    "uk": "Статуя Зеленої Тари на вівтарі"
  }
}

Pictures

Only photos you took yourselves or have written permission to publish. For each picture, confirm the rights (rightsConfirmed: true) and give a credit line (credit).

JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC, up to 10 MB each, the long edge at least 600 pixels (1200 or more is better). Up to 60 pictures in one submission. Name the files in Latin letters, digits, dots, hyphens and underscores, without spaces (tara-retreat.jpg); rename any other file before sending it.

We remove the photo’s hidden data (location, camera), resize it, and publish it with your credit.

Downloads

The same files for every language:

• Template — a file to fill intemplate.v1.json
• Example — a filled-in file of a fictional communityexample.v1.json
• JSON Schema — for code editors and automatic checksschema.v1.json

Check, then send

1. Check the file on the checking page. The file never leaves your browser.
2. Email the file (all its parts) and the pictures to burners.reissue3b@icloud.com with the subject Sangha file: <id>. If the pictures do not fit into one email, send several with the same subject.
3. The editor reads every file. What is approved appears in the calendar with the next update of the site; what is not approved is never published.
4. To change what is published, download your current file from https://www.firstbuddha.space/api/sangha/v1/<id>/contribution.json, edit it, add contact again and send it.

Privacy

The contact details in the file (contact) are used only to reply and are removed before anything is published. Everything else in the file becomes public.

The privacy page