Tripitaka MCP Server

An MCP server for searching and citing content from the Pāli Tipiṭaka. It lets AI clients such as Claude or Cursor 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) and NOTICE.md (data)

✨ Features

• Full Tipiṭaka coverage, at parity with SuttaCentral. All three baskets are indexed, about 444K segments. Sutta carries Pāli plus English from bilara-data's translators (Bhikkhu Sujato for DN/MN/SN/AN and most of the Khuddaka Nikāya, with John Kelly, Bhikkhu Kovilo and others for a few KN books). Vinaya carries Pāli plus Bhikkhu Brahmali's English. Abhidhamma is Pāli only, because upstream bilara-data has no English for any Abhidhamma book. list_structure reports live counts.
• Hybrid search merges keyword and semantic results through Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). It is the most precise of the search tools and needs no configuration.
• Keyword search with trigram fuzzy matching and cross-language alignment.
• Semantic search by meaning, using vector similarity (pgvector).
• Translation comparison across editions, aligned segment by segment.
• Dictionary bridge with 20,000+ entries (P. A. Payutto, PTS, DPPN).
• Sutta fetch and citations. Get a sutta by ID (mn1, pli-tv-bu-vb-pj1, patthana1.1) and generate a properly formatted academic citation.
• Pāli word analyzer that strips inflectional suffixes to find the root form when a dictionary lookup misses (bhikkhūnaṁ → bhikkhu).
• Cross-reference URLs in every response: a clickable deep link into 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, and AI clients surface the link so users can verify the source in one click.
• Dual transport: 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 and tool selection, places (Mahājanapada, holy sites, cosmology), 10 foundational themes with locus classicus, about 30 major figures, and a phase-based timeline of the Buddha's 45-year mission. Sutta IDs are verified against live data, and an AI client can fetch one page instead of running 30+ tool calls.
• Claude skill. skills/tipitaka-research.md is a ready-to-install workflow file that turns on a multi-step research pattern (clarify → verify coverage → search → drill in → cite) on Claude Desktop and Claude Code.
• Postman collection included 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)

Connecting Claude Desktop takes three steps. Nothing to install but Node.js, and no Docker or GPU.

1. Find your absolute npx path. Claude Desktop doesn't read your shell profile, so a bare npx won't resolve. Open a terminal:

which npx
# example: /Users/you/.nvm/versions/node/v22.14.0/bin/npx

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:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tripitaka": {
      "command": "YOUR_NPX_PATH",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.tripitaka-mcp.com/mcp"],
      "env": { "PATH": "YOUR_NODE_BIN_DIR:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin" }
    }
  }
}

3. Quit Claude Desktop completely (⌘Q on macOS, tray → Quit on Windows) and reopen. The 🔌 indicator in the bottom-left should show tripitaka with 14 tools available.

The first connection takes 5 to 10 seconds while npx downloads mcp-remote on demand. Give Claude Desktop a moment after the restart before deciding it failed.

Once connected, try asking Claude things like:

• "What does the Buddha teach about mindfulness of breathing? Quote the relevant passages from MN 118."
• "Show me the full text of the Karaṇīyamettasutta in Pāli and English."
• "What does the Pāli word sati mean according to the Payutto dictionary?"
• "Find suttas where the Buddha discusses anger."

Claude will pick the right tool, fetch the canonical Pāli, and surface a clickable link to the project's bilingual reader for verification.

以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗