API terms

Permitted use

You may use the service for personal study, scholarship, teaching, citation work, non-commercial research, and applications that help people find or examine underlying materials. Reasonable automated retrieval is welcome.

• Keep supplied citations, textual layers, sources, translators, and rights information with reproduced excerpts.
• Link to the supplied Dhamma data page or upstream source when publishing derived work.
• Identify machine-generated interpretation as interpretation, not canonical text, translation, or traditional commentary.
• Check the item-specific licence before redistributing more than a short scholarly excerpt.

Source texts and licences

Dhamma data does not relicense the corpus. Texts, translations, dictionaries, and articles remain governed by their respective source licences and copyright notices. Item-specific result metadata takes priority over general catalogue descriptions.

Collections may require attribution, non-commercial use, share-alike terms, fair-use handling, or other source-specific restrictions. Preserve Buddhist Publication Society fair-use notices where they appear. Do not assume that unclear rights mean public domain; follow the linked source or ask before republishing.

Primary text, commentary, sub-commentary, translation, dictionary material, and modern secondary writing are not interchangeable authorities.

Operational limits

Requests are bounded and rate-limited to keep the public scholarly service available. Respect response limits, pagination, retry guidance, and HTTP 429 responses; cache stable results where appropriate.

• Do not evade rate limits or interfere with service operation.
• Do not reconstruct or redistribute the corpus wholesale.
• Do not probe for private translations, credentials, personal collections, research dossiers, or unpublished administrative data.
• Do not strip provenance, misstate a source, or imply endorsement by a translator, publisher, tradition, or Dhamma data.
• Do not use the service for unlawful, deceptive, malicious, or abusive activity.

AI-assisted use

Dhamma data retrieves evidence; it does not certify an assistant’s answer. Models may omit context, confuse textual layers, or add interpretations absent from a cited passage. Review source links and the claims you publish or act upon.

Availability and changes

The service and metadata are provided as available, without a promise of uninterrupted access, complete coverage, or freedom from transcription and cataloguing errors. Endpoints, limits, and terms may change as the service matures; material changes will be dated.

Access may be limited when necessary to protect readers, operation, or source rights. Please report incorrect attribution or rights metadata so it can be corrected.

Questions and corrections

Email Keenan@boothcheck.com for permission questions, attribution concerns, or a proposed use that does not fit these terms.