BuddhaNexus (legacy site)
Legacy notice — June 2025
This BuddhaNexus instance has not been actively developed or maintained
since early 2023. It remains online in read-only mode for reference
and citation purposes, but data and features will gradually become
outdated.
An actively maintained successor, DharmaNexus, is
currently in development and will launch later this summer at:
dharmamitra.org
Regarding the architecture of the platform, including the design of its core algorithms and the web interface, please see this publication (the same architecture was used for all languages):
Nehrdich, Sebastian (2020). "A Method for the Calculation of Parallel Passages for Buddhist Chinese Sources Based on Million-scale Nearest Neighbor Search." Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, 5(2), 132-153.
Regarding the Sanskrit-Tibetan matching algorithm and dataset, please see this publication:
Nehrdich, Sebastian (2022). "SansTib, a Sanskrit - Tibetan Parallel Corpus and Bilingual Sentence Embedding Model." Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 6728–6734.
For the Sanskrit word segmentation step, which made the Sanskrit textual match detection possible™, please see:
Hellwig, Oliver and Sebastian Nehrdich (2018). "Sanskrit Word Segmentation Using Character-level Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Networks." Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2754–2763.
Project history
BuddhaNexus was originally conceived by
Sebastian Nehrdich, Dr. Orna Almogi, and Prof. Dr. Dorji Wangchuk at the
Khyentse Center for Tibetan Buddhist Textual Scholarship,
Universität Hamburg, and was developed between 2019 – 2023 by chief developer
Sebastian Nehrdich, who designed and implemented the core algorithms, with invaluable help from:
Ven. Ayya Vimala (front-end programming; Pāli-data curation),
Hubert Dworczyński (front- and back-end programming),
Vladimir Angirov (front- and back-end programming; match generation),
and Prof. Kiyonori Nagasaki (Tibetan visual-chart design).
The development was significantly supported by the Khyentse Foundation. In addition to that, a significant amount of voluntary work by the entire team made the
project possible.
The codebase has since been released under the
GNU GPL v3 Licence. Source repositories and data
pipelines remain publicly available for anyone who wishes to deploy or
extend the platform.
Source & datasets
Questions & future development
For updates on DharmaNexus or inquiries about collaboration, please check
the new
project site. Technical issues with this legacy
instance are no longer being addressed.