Abstract:
Presentation: Dharmamitra in 2026: Current Capabilities and Future Developments
Dharmamitra is a rapidly evolving platform that brings advanced AI capabilities to the world of Buddhist textual scholarship. Since its inception in 2024, it has seen a significant increase in capabilities, covering not just machine translation, but by now advanced search, intertextuality research, OCR, and dictionary capabilities as well. In this talk, I will discuss the current state of the platform, its main features and design philosophy, and what future developments we are planning.
Workshop: AcceleratedSanskrit Textual Scholarship in the Age of Agentic AI
This hands-on workshop explores how agentic AI systems, particularly large language model agents such as Claude Code, can significantly accelerate the workflow of classical Sanskrit philology. Through live demonstrations drawn from ongoing research, participants will see how contemporary AI tools assist in tasks central to the discipline: identifying quotations and textual parallels across large corpora, performing metrical analysis, reconstructing the relative chronology of texts through corpus seriation, building and cleaning large segmented corpora, computational authorship attribution, and the close analysis of literary topoi. The workshop illustrates how agentic AI accelerates the traditional philological workflow by orders of magnitude, opening up research possibilities that were previously out of reach. We will discuss further directions, limitations, and the implications of working with technologies that are advancing at a breakneck speed.
About the speakers:
Sebastian Nehrdich is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Tohoku University. He completed his PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf, co-supervised by Oliver Hellwig and Kurt Keut-zer. He holds an MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of Hamburg. His work integrates digital phi-lology, Buddhist textual analysis, and machine learning. He serves as Director of the Dharmamitra project that was founded at the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), has managed the ML infrastructure of the ChronBMM project, and has led the development of the BuddhaNexus platform 2018-2023, now continued as DharmaNexus.
Kengo Harimoto is a scholar of Indology and Buddhist Studies specializing in Sanskrit philology, yoga philosophy, and the history of Śaivism, with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1999). He has held academic positions at institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America — including the University of Hamburg, Mahidol University, and the University of Naples "L'Orientale" — the latest affiliation being Tohoku University. His most significant publication is God, Reason, and Yoga (2014), a critical edition and translation of the commentary ascribed to Śaṅkara on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and his broader research spans Purāṇic literature, the Śivadharma corpus, and the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Alongside his traditional philological work, he has contributed to digital humanities through the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project. Recently, he has been working on computational approaches to Sanskrit textual scholarship.
Please join us in person or on Zoom:
Dharmamitra: Buddhist Philology in the Age of AI
https://lmu-munich.zoom-x.de/j/61115180548?pwd=TQ3emVUv7NI2hF3ry0x7b4A01g6z93.1
ID: 611 1518 0548
Password: 579977