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TNH Scholar

TNH Scholar is intended to support a community-aligned, open-source, multilingual digital ecosystem for studying, translating, and engaging with the teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh and the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism.

This document contains deeper onboarding and architectural context. For a more concise intro to the project, see the README.

Vision & Aspirations

TNH Scholar is intended as a long-term effort to support the living Plum Village tradition with trustworthy, transparent digital tools. This work is intended, both in development and usage, to deeply respect the tradition and practice of Thích Nhất Hạnh and the Plum Village community.

  • Support the building of multilingual corpora spanning Thích Nhất Hạnh's teachings, wider Plum Village teachings, and freely available source Buddhist texts, with high-fidelity text, rich metadata, and sentence-level alignment across languages.
  • Provide AI-assisted research tools that expose their reasoning and keep human judgment central, serving monastics, practitioners, teachers, and researchers.
  • Support cross-lingual research with support for Vietnamese, English, French, Chinese, Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and other sources.
  • Enable rich interactive environments like bilingual readers combining scans, text, translations, and audio.
  • Enable human-supervised AI workflows for corpus processing, translation, and evaluation.
  • Engage with current Plum Village dharma teachers as the living continuation of the tradition, extending the corpus beyond Thây's legacy to the broader teaching community.
  • Reach toward historical canonical sources — Pāli suttas, Tibetan texts, Sanskrit originals — that form the deeper roots from which the modern teachings grow.

This work is envisioned on a multi-year to multi-decade timescale. The CLI tools and GenAI Service in this repository are the early infrastructure for that larger arc.

For the full vision, including scope, non-scope, relationship to spin-offs, and time horizon, see:

Note on Terminology: Earlier versions of TNH Scholar referred to engineered AI prompts as "Patterns" to emphasize their engineering pattern nature. Current documentation uses "Prompt" to align with industry standards. References to "Pattern" in legacy documentation should be read as "Prompt".

What TNH Scholar Aspires to Make Possible

TNH Scholar aspires to support the community in:

  • Exploring teachings with bilingual text and translation side-by-side
  • Searching themes and teachings across languages and periods using semantic search and retrieval
  • Discovering related teachings, concepts, and practices through advanced search capabilities
  • Reviewing and refining translations collaboratively with transparent history
  • Connecting practitioners, researchers, and teachers with reliable digital resources
  • Preserving teaching materials for future generations with clarity and care

These are aspirational but active development goals aligned with the needs of the Plum Village community.

Current Features

  • Audio and transcript processing: audio-transcribe with diarization and YouTube support
  • Text formatting and translation: tnh-gen CLI for prompt-driven text processing with human-friendly defaults and API mode for programmatic use — see the Thầy Edited Journal Text Case Study for a fully worked OCR-to-translation example
  • Headless workflow orchestration: tnh-conductor for maintained local/bootstrap workflow execution with status watching and canonical run artifacts
  • Acquisition utilities: ytt-fetch for transcripts; token-count and nfmt for prep and planning
  • Setup and configuration: tnh-setup plus guided config in Getting Started
  • Prompt system: See Prompt System Architecture and ADR-PT03 for current status and roadmap

✅ tnh-gen v1.0 Available: The tnh-gen CLI is now fully implemented with dual output modes (human-friendly by default, --api flag for machine-readable output). See tnh-gen CLI Reference for complete documentation.

Getting Started

Choose your path based on your primary interest:

Path 1: Use the Tools

For practitioners, translators, and researchers ready to work with TNH Scholar:

Get up and running with TNH Scholar's CLI tools for transcription, translation, and text processing:

Path 2: Understand the Vision & Principles

For community members, stakeholders, and and those exploring how this project fits within Plum Village initiatives:

Explore the project's foundation, values, and long-term direction:

  • Vision & Scope: Project Vision – multi-year aspirations, community alignment, and what's in/out of scope
  • Philosophy: Philosophy – ethical foundations and mindful technology principles
  • Principles: Design Principles – transparency, human judgment, and architectural values
  • Community Context: Parallax Overview – relationship to broader Plum Village digital initiatives

Path 3: Contribute to Development

For developers, architects, and contributors:

Understand the technical foundation and start contributing:

Documentation Overview

  • Getting Started: Installation, configuration, first-run guidance
  • User Guide: Task-oriented workflows and practical how-tos
  • CLI Reference: Auto-generated command documentation for every CLI entry point
  • API: Python API reference (mkdocstrings)
  • Architecture: ADRs, design docs, system diagrams by component
  • Development: Contributor guides, design principles, engineering practices
  • Docs Ops: Style guides, ADR template, documentation maintenance
  • Research: Experiments, evaluations, exploratory notes

Project Status

TNH Scholar is currently in alpha stage. Expect ongoing API and workflow changes during active development.

Support & Community

License

This project is licensed under the GPL-3.0 License.

Documentation Map

Auto-generated map of the documentation hierarchy. Regenerated during docs builds; edit source content instead of this file.

Getting Started

User Guide

Project

Community

CLI Reference

Architecture

Development

Docs Ops

Research