dhamma-seeker/tripitaka-mcp

An MCP Server for searching and citing content from the Pāli Tipiṭaka.
Gives AI agents (such as Claude or Cursor) the ability to look up suttas, quote the teachings, and compare translations across languages.
> 🙏 **This project is offered as Dhamma Dāna** — 100% free, non-commercial only.
> License details: LICENSE (code) + NOTICE.md (data)
✨ Features
- 📚 **Full Tipiṭaka coverage at parity with SuttaCentral** — all three baskets indexed (~444K segments): Sutta (Pāli + Sujato English), Vinaya (Pāli + Brahmali English), and Abhidhamma (Pāli only — no English in upstream bilara-data for any Abhidhamma book). Live counts via list_structure.
- ⚖️ **Hybrid Search** — highest precision by combining keyword and semantic search through Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). Ready to use.
- 🔍 **Keyword Search** — trigram fuzzy matching with cross-language alignment.
- 🧠 **Semantic Search** — meaning-based search via vector similarity (pgvector).
- 📖 **Translation Comparison** — view and compare renderings across editions, aligned at the segment level.
- 📚 **Dictionary Bridge** — built-in dictionary of 20,000+ entries (P. A. Payutto, PTS, DPPN).
- 📖 **Get Sutta & Reference** — fetch sutta content by ID (e.g. mn1, pli-tv-bu-vb-pj1, patthana1.1) and generate properly formatted academic citations.
- 🔬 **Pāli word analyzer** — strip inflectional suffixes to find the root form when dictionary lookup misses (bhikkhūnaṁ → bhikkhu).
- 🔗 **Cross-reference URLs in every response** — a clickable deep link to the project's own bilingual reader (Pāli + English, with a segment anchor that highlights the cited verse). The reader renders SuttaCentral's bilara-data verbatim, so it is the authoritative text; AI clients surface this link so users verify the source in one click.
- 📡 **Dual transport** — both legacy SSE (/sse) and canonical Streamable HTTP (/mcp, MCP spec 2025-03-26).
- 📦 **MCP Resources** — tripitaka://structure, tripitaka://sutta/{id}, tripitaka://word/{w} for clients that pin context as resources.
- 📄 **Curated reference pages** at /topics/* — six markdown pages covering canon structure, getting-started + tool selection, places (Mahājanapada + holy sites + cosmology), 10 foundational themes with locus classicus, ~30 major figures, and a phase-based timeline of the Buddha's 45-year mission. Sutta IDs verified against live data; AI clients can fetch a page in one shot instead of running 30+ tool calls.
- 🤖 **Claude skill** — skills/tipitaka-research.md ships a ready-to-install workflow file that activates a multi-step research pattern (clarify → verify coverage → search → drill in → cite) on Claude Desktop / Claude Code.
- 📮 **Postman Ready** — ships with a Postman collection for testing the API.
🏗️ Tech Stack
| Technology | Role |
|---|---|
| Python + FastMCP | MCP Server |
| PostgreSQL + pgvector | Database + Vector Search |
| sentence-transformers | Embeddings for semantic search |
| Docker Compose | Infrastructure |
🚀 Quick Start
🌐 No setup — connect to the public Dhamma Dāna server
The maintainers run a free public instance at **tripitaka-mcp.com**.
| Endpoint | Use |
|---|---|
| https://mcp.tripitaka-mcp.com/mcp | Streamable HTTP (MCP spec 2025-03-26) |
| https://mcp.tripitaka-mcp.com/sse | Legacy SSE (older clients) |
**Connect Claude Desktop in three steps** (no install, no Docker, no GPU — you just need Node.js):
**1.** Find your absolute npx path. Claude Desktop doesn't read your shell profile, so a bare npx won't resolve. Open a terminal:
**2.** Open claude_desktop_config.json (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/ on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\ on Windows) and add the entry below — substitute YOUR_NPX_PATH with the output from step 1, and YOUR_NODE_BIN_DIR with that path's parent directory:
**3.** Quit Claude Desktop completely (⌘Q on macOS, tray → Quit on Windows) and reopen. The 🔌 indicator in the bottom-left should show tripitaka with 12 tools available.
> _First connection takes 5–10 seconds_ while npx downloads mcp-remote on demand — give Claude Desktop a moment after restart before assuming it failed.