fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools

What the historical commentators said about a passage of Buddhist scripture. Give a line of a sūtra and get back the classical commentaries that gloss it — each with the commentator's own words, the work it comes from, a quality tier, and a resolvable citation. This is the layer no other tool exposes for the Chinese canon: CBETA marks up almost none of it, and the alignment behind this was derived text by text. Two things to read carefully rather than skim. `total` is how many commentators the passage actually has — `truncated` says the list you got is a sample. And coverage is partial: roughly half of what a commentator wrote is not aligned, so an absent commentator means "not in the data", never "he said nothing". When nothing matches, `available_sutras` tells you which sūtras have data at all — do not read a miss as silence from the tradition.

Cross-canon parallel passages aligned to a fascicle. fojin's alignment moat: given a Chinese fascicle, returns the aligned Pali/Tibetan/Sanskrit parallels so you can compare how a passage is rendered across traditions. A fascicle returns parallels for the *whole* juan — often hundreds. To narrow them to one passage, match the passage against `source_chunks[].text` and keep the parallels whose `aligns_source_chunk` equals that chunk_index. `urn` is filled for parallels that are fojin works; rows with `source="mitra-parallel"` are inline Skt/Tib sentences with no fojin work to cite, so they carry `original_preview` instead and stay `urn: null`.

Look up a Buddhist term across fojin's dictionaries (748K+ entries).

Search fojin's knowledge graph for entities — people, places, works, doctrinal terms — matching `query`.

Read the full content of one fascicle (卷) of a text, with its `urn`. Use the `text_id`/`juan_num` from a search_corpus hit. Returns the actual canonical text — quote from this, not from memory.

Resolve a fojin URN (e.g. fojin:cbeta/T0001.1) to a reader URL and confirm it exists in the corpus. Use to verify or dereference a citation.

Semantic search across fojin's Buddhist corpus (10K+ texts, 30+ langs). Returns the most relevant passages, each with a `urn`, title, snippet and similarity score. `lang` optionally filters by language code (lzh=Classical Chinese, pi=Pali, sa=Sanskrit, bo=Tibetan, en=English).

Verify that a Buddhist-canon quote exists VERBATIM in the corpus. Call this before presenting any quoted scripture to a reader: LLMs routinely invent plausible-looking quotes. Returns `verbatim` (bool), where it was found (`matches`, each with a resolvable `urn`), or the closest near-miss window when it wasn't. `cite` optionally narrows the search — a CBETA id ("T0374") or fojin URN ("fojin:cbeta/T0374.13") — and `cite_matched` reports honestly whether the quote is where you claimed (a hit in a different fascicle does NOT confirm your citation). Quote must be ≥4 CJK chars after normalisation; Classical Chinese only. Short quotes are answered but say less: a four-character phrase recurs across the canon, so read `cite_matched` rather than `verbatim`, and check `matches_capped` before treating the list as complete. Each match carries an absolute `reader_url` — cite that, not a reconstructed third-party link.