Letter to Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery

Before sending

• https://www.abhayagiri.org/contact lists contact forms by topic; there is no email address on the page. “Other” (https://www.abhayagiri.org/contact/other) suits this letter; “Ask about free-distribution books” (https://www.abhayagiri.org/contact/ask-about-free-distribution-books) is an alternative.
• The page also lists a phone number, +1-707-485-1630.
• A contact form counts as sending a message: the maintainer submits it, not an agent.
• Fill in the maintainer’s name and reply-to address. Only the maintainer sends this letter; agents never send it.
• After sending, update the status in README.md. Record the reply in docs/sources.md.

Letter

Subject: Permission request: the Abhayagiri chanting book in a free scripture-study tool

Dear Abhayagiri Sangha and friends,

I maintain Pali Canon for Claude (https://github.com/DaniilKi/pali-canon-claude), a free, open-source tool that helps AI assistants such as Claude look up and quote the Pāli Canon accurately instead of paraphrasing it from memory. When someone asks about a sutta, the assistant retrieves the actual passage from a named source and gives its citation (for example “MN 10” or “M i 55”), the translator or editor, the licence and a link to the original page. The tool is a library, not a teacher: it gives no rulings on practice and does not rank teachers or traditions.

How we would use your work. We plan to add a set of protective chants (paritta), such as the Maṅgala, Ratana, Karaṇīyamettā and Khandha parittas. The Pāli will come from the VRI edition of the canon. Many readers chant from the Abhayagiri chanting book, and we would like to show its English renderings alongside the Pāli, credited to Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery, with a link to your free copy of the book. Without your permission, we will use the Pāli only and link to your book.

These safeguards apply to everything the tool returns, and we would keep them for your work:

• Attribution on every result. Each passage comes back with the source’s name, the translator or editor, the licence or terms, and a link to the original page.
• Non-commercial. The tool is free. There are no fees, paid tiers or advertising, and we do not sell or license anyone’s content. The software itself is MIT-licensed; texts keep their own terms.
• Word for word. We never edit, rewrite or generate scripture or translations. Abbreviated passages are flagged as such, and we never silently swap one translation for another.
• Not a training dataset. We do not build or supply datasets for training AI models. A passage is handed to the assistant only in the conversation where a reader asked for it, so that it can be quoted and cited correctly.
• Light, read-only access. The tool reads only from a short list of approved sites, one page at a time when a reader asks; it does not crawl.
• Your wishes come first. SuttaCentral has asked not to be used in AI tools, so we only link to it. If you would prefer the same, we will switch to links only and record your wishes publicly in our source library (https://github.com/DaniilKi/pali-canon-claude/blob/main/docs/sources.md).

What we are asking.

1. May we reproduce the English translations of the chants (and, if appropriate, their arrangement) from your chanting book, with credit and a link, in this free tool?
2. If yes, which edition should we use, and is there a credit line you would like?
3. If you prefer, may we simply link to the chanting book for each chant?
4. Separately: if you publish recorded Dhamma talks online, may we link to them? We would show only a talk’s title, date and a link to your page, never its text or audio, and only through a search or index you provide. If you have, or would consider, an index of talks by sutta, we would gladly use it so that readers can go from a passage to talks about it.

If it would help, I am happy to send more detail, show you the tool working, or change how your work is presented. A short reply is plenty, and “no” is a perfectly good answer: we will follow it.

With thanks and respect for your work,

[Maintainer’s name] Maintainer, Pali Canon for Claude — https://github.com/DaniilKi/pali-canon-claude Reply to: [maintainer’s email address]