Three observances, three texts, and a tradition tag that deliberately computes nothing. This is the thinnest dharma in the app, and the reasons are written down.
Three observances ship for Buddhist users: Dhammachakra Pravartan Din, the opening of Pavarana and Kathina Kaal, and Kartik Purnima Vandana. That is the whole calendar. For comparison, the Hindu calendar in the same app carries thirty-three.
This page could open by describing the three in loving detail and let you infer that there are more. There are not. The gap is the most useful thing to know about this part of the app, and every other section here exists to explain how it happened and what was chosen instead of closing it badly.
None of the three is a stored date. Each is a lunar month and a tithi resolved by the same engine that dates every parva in the app, Dhammachakra Pravartan Din on Ashwin Shukla Dashami, resolved aparahna-vyapini; Pavarana on Ashwin Shukla Purnima; Kartik Purnima Vandana on Kartik Shukla Purnima.
They are also, specifically, Ambedkarite observances. Dhammachakra Pravartan Din marks the dhamma-deeksha taken at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur in 1956; the app's own explanation of the day says exactly that. The other two are the Ashwin and Kartik purnima observances that go with the kathina season. This is not a pan-Buddhist calendar with three entries filled in. It is one tradition's calendar, and calling it anything else would be the over-claim.
At onboarding a Buddhist user picks Theravada, Mahayana or Vajrayana. Nothing in the app calculates from that answer, and the code is unusually blunt about why.
The comment on the enum records the reasoning: the three observances that ship do not vary between the schools, so there is no calculation for the tag to feed. It is a descriptive label held against the day a tradition-varying event is added. And it finishes with the part worth quoting: forcing a false calculation now would be wrong.
That is a decision to leave a setting inert rather than make it look busy. The onboarding screen tells the user the same thing in plain language, ZindSa carries one Buddhist corpus, in Pali, and shows it to every school; it holds no Mahayana or Vajrayana material yet; your answer is saved and will be used when school-specific content is added.
Vesak is the obvious absence, and Asalha Puja and Magha Puja with it. None of them exists anywhere in the app, not as an event, not as a string, not as a placeholder.
The reason is the same one the tradition tag is waiting on. These are precisely the observances that fall on different days in different traditions, and dating them needs the tag to become an input to the calculation rather than a label on a profile. Adding them with the tag ignored would put a single date in front of every school and be wrong for most of them; adding them with the tag half-wired would be worse.
So they are absent, and the absence is recorded rather than left for a user to discover in May. That is the same discipline that leaves eight table-dependent muhurats out of the Hindu calendar and the Orthodox Nativity Fast out of the Christian one: an unverified number is not shipped at all.
There is no Uposatha calendar event, for the reason above. There is an Uposatha reminder, and it is a different kind of object: a notification rather than a calendar entry.
It fires on the lunar days the app can already compute, tithis eight, fifteen, twenty-three and thirty, found by walking forward through the next month and testing each day's tithi. It is on by default for users whose own dharma is Buddhist and can be switched off in Settings. The copy is two lines: Uposatha today, a day for precepts and practice. It does not tell you which Uposatha, because the app does not know which tradition's reckoning you keep.
Two daily entries sit alongside it, both derived from the sun rather than a tradition: pratah dhyan at sunrise, sayam vandana at sunset.
The corpus is the Tisarana, the five Panca Sila precepts, and three verses of the Dhammapada, verses 1, 5 and 183, all in Pali, printed in Devanagari, each with its own citation.
The Dhammapada has four hundred and twenty-three verses across twenty-six vaggas. Three of them are here. The code says why, and it is not a plan: only the verses that could be reproduced with full confidence in exact Pali were added in that pass. Reproducing a scripture approximately is not a smaller version of reproducing it correctly.
The plain-language meanings that sit beside those verses have authorship the project's licence register has not established, in every dharma, and that is recorded as one open row rather than smoothed over.
Buddhist Life Guidance never returns a computed answer. Its governing rule cites the Brahmajala Sutta's treatment of prediction, and the mechanism offers a dhamma reflection instead, for any question, including the ones people most want a number for.
Two of the seven life domains are marked honestly uncovered. Health and travel surface no verse and no citation at all, because the three texts in the corpus contain nothing about the body, illness or healing and nothing about journeys. The fifth Panca Sila precept was considered for the health domain and rejected: it is a precept about heedlessness and moral training, and reading it as health guidance is exactly the stretch that pass existed to remove.
Tying the guidance to the Uposatha reminder was considered too, and not forced. A thin corpus honestly labelled is a thin corpus. A thin corpus dressed up with cross-references is a claim, and this is the dharma where that temptation is strongest.
Related: which Buddhist observances ZindSa shows in the FAQ, and what ZindSa does not do for your dharma. All posts.