17 March 2026 | Guest lecture by Prof. Sebastian Nehrdich (Tohoku University)

We are pleased to announce the next guest lecture in the Gandhara Corpora Lecture Series on 17 March 2026:

 

DharmaNexus as a Multilingual Graph of Buddhist Intertextuality: Design Choices, Research Uses, and Future Applications

by Prof. Sebastian Nehrdich (Tohoku University)

 

All are welcome. The Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series is in-person and hybrid online.

Locating textual parallels, translations, citations, and topically related passages across vast collections of texts in multiple languages is a basic requirement of philological work in Buddhist Studies. Recent advances in digitization, OCR, and cross-lingual information retrieval have fundamentally changed access to this kind of evidence, with far-reaching implications for how philological research can be conducted. A central component in this context is DharmaNexus: a database that stores intertextual relationships between passages across languages and sources, and that supports the retrieval and comparison functions used in the Dharmamitra tool ecosystem.
In this presentation, I will discuss DharmaNexus as a verifiable “evidence layer” for AI-assisted multilingual research. I will highlight key design choices and show how intertextual relationships are determined and represented. I will also demonstrate how this data is already used in research-facing tools for discovering and inspecting parallels and reuse patterns in Buddhist literature. Finally, I will address limitations and risks that can arise from over-reliance on these systems, and outline further possible research applications enabled by this architecture.

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 Keutzer. He holds an MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of Hamburg. His work integrates digital philology, 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.