Dharmamitra & DharmaNexus: A New Set of Digital Tools for the Philological Study of Buddhist Texts
Date:
Traditional philological work on Buddhist sources often consists of laborious keyword searches across disparate corpora in multiple languages, followed by manual collation of parallels, a workflow that favours stamina over insight. Dharmamitra is an open-source platform that collapses those tasks to seconds using advanced computational and deep learning methods.
At its core, DharmaNexus hosts a curated corpus of more than 16,000 texts in Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan and Chinese. A heat-map interface exposes intertextual density at a glance and lets users pivot instantly from say, a Sanskrit sentence to possible parallel passages in Sanskrit or to its Tibetan or Chinese counterparts.
Built on that corpus, MITRA Search adds semantic and cross-lingual retrieval: an English query such as “a verse comparing the suffering of ordinary beings to a hair on the palm of the hand” returns possible attestations across all four languages, including passages no keyword search could catch, complete with contextual explanations and links into DharmaNexus.
For close reading, MITRA Deep Research automatically aligns a working translation with relevant passages from Dharmanexus and additional literature, with deep links into DharmaNexus just a click away.
The talk will demonstrate the individual tools and give an overview of their technical background. Separate from the talk there will also be a workshop that will introduce special workflows relevant for philological work on Buddhist material, such as identifying Chinese Āgama sections based on Sanskrit or Pāli queries, locating Sūtra passages in Chinese texts based on queries in Tibetan, as well as using DharmaNexus as a convenient gateway to exploring intertextuality of central Yogācāra texts.