Letter to Buddhist Publication Society (BPS)

Before sending

• https://www.bps.lk/contact has a contact form and an email shown in protected form that decodes to bps@bps.lk. Postal address: P.O. Box 61, 54 Sangharaja Mawatha, Kandy, Sri Lanka.
• The form’s categories are General, Membership and Bookshop Orders; use General.
• 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: BPS publications in a free scripture-study tool: a courtesy note and request

Dear friends at the Buddhist Publication Society,

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 use your work. Many translations on Access to Insight first appeared as BPS publications (the Wheel and Bodhi Leaves series and others), and carry the BPS free-distribution notice. When a reader asks for one of these, the tool fetches that page from Access to Insight and returns it with the BPS notice exactly as shown there, the translator and a link.

Other BPS translations, including works by Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli that are not on Access to Insight, are at present only mentioned and linked to bps.lk. The tool contains none of their text.

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. Please confirm that serving the BPS free-distribution texts already on Access to Insight, with the BPS notice, is in keeping with your terms.
2. Would BPS allow short quotations, or direct links, for other BPS translations, with full credit and a link to bps.lk?
3. Is there a credit line you would like us to use?

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]