Christian Wittern is a scholar of Chinese Chan Buddhism. He completed his doctorate at the University of Goettingen in Oct. 1996 with the dissertation topic "Das Yulu des Chan Buddhismus. Die Entwicklung vom 8.-11. Jahrhundert am Beispiel des 28. Kapitels des Jingde chuandenglu (1004)", Bern , Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1998 (Peter Lang), and, according to the German system, received his certification in March 1998 following the publication of the thesis.

In addition to his research on Chinese Chan, Dr. Wittern is well-known for his work in the area of the digitization of East Asian literary resources, most importantly East Asian Buddhist canonical texts. While working as a research assistant at the International Research Instititue for Zen Buddhism at Hanazono University during the early 90's he contributed much, along with Urs App, to the creation of the ZenBase CD-ROM.

He is currently employed as an Associate Researcher at the Chung-Hwa institute in Taipei, where an important segment of his duties lie in his capacity as Adviser to the Buddhist Studies Information Network Center (which has been established also at Chung-Hwa) and Adviser to the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA), overseeing the digitization and markup of East Asian Buddhist canonical works.

It is Dr. Wittern who first took the dictionary from its relatively amorphous form and applied a basic SGML markup structure, which has served as an indispensible basis for the further development of the work. He also added over 3,000 Pinyin readings during the early stages when the dictionary only had Wade-Giles information.