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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47197
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47197
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Real Buddhist meditations are probably public domain (not copyrighted, or in current USA law copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years).

Presumably they are very old meditations and thus not intellectual property of any person or entity.

You can still avoid plagiarism by having a character reference the book, telling people a meditation "comes from the X Y Z".

Or in prose, you can say

> The meditation they used was first written in the scroll X Y Z.

For many ancient works, if you can find the instructions unattributed in multiple sources so it isn't possible to know the original source, then you do not have to cite any of them.

If your book claims a copyright, read to see if it allows limited copying. It is legal to copyright a **translation** from the original language, so if you are presenting the English version of a meditation originally written in Chinese, then you have a copyright issue, but the author may allow copying of a single meditation. That is often done for copyrighted Bible verses (because the original was not in English). The King James version is public domain, but not the NEW King James version or many other recent translations (recent being in the last century or two).

If the authors don't say they allow copying on the copyright page, then you are getting into legal territory, and I am not a lawyer.

Original score: 3