Buddhist — The Buddhologist

The Buddhologist — the dharma across the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan canons.

Cross-cutting by design: SuttaCentral, CBETA, SARIT, and GRETIL whole — membership is whole-source, so GRETIL rides here although only part of its shelf is Buddhist — and the Derge Kangyur and Tengyur: the fourth canon leg.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these fourteen answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Private research materials under personal grants are not listed.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): pli 97,454 · xct 64,867 · san 10,449 · eng 7,150 · lzh 5,602 · cmg 1,069 · mnc 1,068 · san-Latn 817 · en 389 · cmn 279 … and 7 more (nabu axis buddhist lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (lotsawa-house — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): fra 624 · spa 333 · deu 277 · por 142 · ita 74 … and 1 more (nabu axis buddhist lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• Cross-canon by design: SuttaCentral (the Pali canon and the Āgamas), SARIT, GRETIL whole (only part is Buddhist — the honest whole-source note), and CBETA (the Buddhist canon in Literary Chinese).
• Monier-Williams is reachable through the Indic overlap; no alignment work rides this desk.

Working the buddhist desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable buddhist               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync buddhist                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis buddhist          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis buddhist                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis buddhist   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu search dharma --axis buddhist    # one query across the Pali, Sanskrit and Chinese canons
nabu search dukkha --lang pli --axis buddhist  # the Pali canon
nabu search 涅槃 --lang lzh --axis buddhist  # CBETA's Literary Chinese — nirvāṇa in the Taishō
nabu parallels urn:nabu:suttacentral:an1.11-20:an1.11:1.1  # reception and echo across the canon — the AN refrain found in SN
nabu formulas urn:nabu:suttacentral:an1 --lang pli  # the repeated formulas of the Aṅguttara, mined from the Pali lane

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “What are the Chinese parallels to the Saccavibhaṅga Sutta?” → nabu_links urn:nabu:suttacentral:mn141 — SuttaCentral’s curated parallels as edges: MN 141 ↔ 中阿含經 31 (分別聖諦經, the Madhyama Āgama parallel, lzh) plus DN 22 and two Ekottara Āgama parallels — cross-canon navigation in one call.

Terminal setup

• Sanskrit / Pali (IAST): Noto Sans Mono; Devanagari needs a conjunct-capable fallback (system default is fine).
• CBETA Literary Chinese (lzh): install the Noto CJK casks plus Jigmo for rare Ext-B+ Han, and keep iTerm2’s “treat ambiguous-width as double-width” off to match nabu’s narrow measurement.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.