Ten ancient advisors, one plain rule about evidence.
Hundred Masters answers modern dilemmas in the voice of ten Chinese philosophers. This page says who runs it, how the conversations actually work, and what we will never do to a quotation.
Who writes here
Hundred Masters is founded and edited by Anderson. He sets the editorial rules the essays are written under, chooses every topic from public demand data rather than intuition, and owns the verification step that checks each classical quotation against a primary text before publication.
He also built this site: the sage personas, the retrieval pipeline behind them, and the daily research routine that produces the essays. Questions, corrections and disagreements all reach him at hello@hundredmasters.com, and he answers within 48 hours.
What Hundred Masters is
Ten thinkers from the Warring States period and its neighbourhood: Laozi, Confucius, Mengzi, Xunzi, Mozi, Han Feizi, Sun Tzu, Zhuangzi, Guiguzi and Guanzi. Between them they argued out most of what a person can believe about power, duty, work, loss and other people, and they did it with unusual bluntness.
The premise is narrow on purpose. You bring a live problem, and one of them answers in his own idiom, from his own text. Not a summary of the tradition. A position, with a chapter behind it. Meet the ten or read the essays.
How the sage conversations work
Each persona is a large language model constrained to one thinker: his vocabulary, his commitments, the moves his text actually makes. When a sage cites a chapter, that citation comes from the persona and is worth checking, exactly as you would check any confident speaker. The essays on this site are held to a stricter standard, described below.
Two thousand years of distance also has to be respected. These men wrote for rulers, in societies organised around obligations most readers no longer share. Where an essay extends a passage beyond what its author meant, it says so in the text rather than quietly borrowing his authority.
How the essays are made
Every essay follows the same four steps. Topics come from real questions people are publicly asking, quoted and linked, never from a keyword tool alone. Every Chinese passage is retrieved from a primary text database and checked character by character before it is quoted. Machine translations are not trusted; where they are wrong the essay translates from the Chinese and names the standard scholarly edition instead. Numbers that cannot be sourced are not written.
Drafting is AI-assisted under those rules, and every published piece is verified and signed off by Anderson. The full standard, including what happens when a source cannot be reached, is set out in the editorial policy.
Found an error?
Tell us. A misattributed chapter, a translation that reads the grammar wrong, a claim about a text that the text does not support: all of it gets fixed, and substantive corrections are noted on the page. Write to hello@hundredmasters.com or use the contact page.