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TNH-Scholar Project Vision

This document defines the long-term north star of the TNH-Scholar project — its purpose, scope, aspirations, and the future directions it aims toward.

1. Purpose

TNH-Scholar exists to serve the living Plum Village tradition by:

  • Making Thích Nhất Hạnh’s teachings more accessible, discoverable, and navigable.
  • Supporting deep, careful study by monastics, lay students, researchers, and practitioners.
  • Providing trustworthy, transparent AI-assisted tools that respect the Dharma, the lineage, and the humans who work with them.

The project is not “just” a software system. It is a long-term scholarly and technical infrastructure for interacting with a body of teachings.

2. Core Vision

At a high level, TNH-Scholar aims to become:

  • A canonical, clean, multi-lingual corpus of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s work and related sources, with:
  • High-fidelity text,
  • Rich metadata,
  • Sentence-level alignment across languages,
  • Footnotes, references, and contextual markers.
  • A flexible AI-assisted research environment that:
  • Helps users search, explore, compare, and understand teachings.
  • Provides transparent reasoning and provenance for all AI outputs.
  • A foundation for future interactive tools:
  • Conversational exploration agents,
  • Guided study companions,
  • Practice-support tools,
  • Visual and audio interfaces (e.g., JVB viewer, audio transcription pipelines).

3. Long-Horizon Aspirations

Over the long term, TNH-Scholar is envisioned to support:

  • Cross-lingual, cross-corpus research:
  • Aligning Vietnamese, English, French, Chinese, Pāli, Sanskrit, Tibetan sources.
  • Surfacing conceptual parallels across canons and modern commentaries.
  • Rich interactive experiences:
  • Bilingual reading environments,
  • Side-by-side views of scanned pages, cleaned text, translations, and annotations,
  • Audio + transcript + translation aligned at sentence/segment level.
  • Agentic workflows (human-supervised automations):
  • Corpus cleaning and enrichment loops,
  • Translation and evaluation pipelines,
  • Semi-automated test and data-generation loops for models,
  • Eventually: code-aware agents that help maintain the TNH-Scholar system itself.

The long-term vision is not to replace human scholars or practitioners, but to:

Extend human capacity for understanding, cross-referencing, and preserving the teachings — while always keeping human judgment and responsibility at the center.

4. Scope and Non-Scope

In scope:

  • Tools to structure, clean, annotate, translate, and search the corpus.
  • Infrastructure to support reliable AI-assisted workflows (GenAIService, patterns, provenance).
  • Developer and research tooling (CLI, VS Code integration, batch jobs, evaluation tools).

Out of scope (for TNH-Scholar itself):

  • Becoming a generic LLM platform unrelated to Plum Village or Buddhist studies.
  • Building closed or opaque systems where the source texts, transformations, and models cannot be inspected or critiqued.
  • Automation that removes humans from the loop in any way that would obscure responsibility, ethical judgment, or interpretive nuance.

5. Relationship to Spin-Offs and Descendants

TNH-Scholar may eventually give rise to:

  • Separate tools focused on:
  • Software engineering assistance,
  • General AI infrastructure,
  • Generic prompt/pattern frameworks.
  • Specialized research platforms built on its data and abstractions.

The guiding principle is:

TNH-Scholar remains the reference home for Dharma-focused, Plum Village–centric work.
Spin-offs may reuse its design patterns and components, but do not dilute this core identity.

6. Time Scale

This project is intended as a multi-year, possibly multi-decade effort.
Design choices should:

  • Favor composability and clarity over short-term hacks.
  • Respect that future maintainers (human and AI) will need to understand the intent behind the system.
  • Support gradual refinement rather than one-off prototypes that cannot grow.

This vision document is living. It should be revisited when major architectural shifts occur or when the project’s role in the broader ecosystem meaningfully changes.