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fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools MCP Server

answering

fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools is answering right now. Last checked moments ago. It exposes 8 tools. Last commit 13 Sep 2026.

Buddhist canon tools: search, passages, cross-canon parallels, dictionaries — all URN-cited.

Uptime history 41 days of history
41 days agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
92 of 92 checks
8
Tools
read from the server
799 ms
Response time
average over 24h
343
Stars
last commit 13 Sep 2026

What changed 3

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 10 August 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

16 Aug a tool description was rewritten get_parallels
10 Aug a tool appeared commentaries
10 Aug a tool changed version

What the code does

We read the source, 54 min ago · tools taken from the live server · rules 3dff92dd89df

Capabilities

What this server is able to do. For an MCP server this is often the job itself — a terminal server runs commands because that is what it is for. Listed so you know what you are plugging in, not as an accusation.

Builds a database query by concatenation backend/app/services/embedding.py:173
        base_select + where_clause

Is this your server and something here is wrong? Tell us — corrections are free and do not require a plan.

This code can reach further than it looks

We found places where it runs commands, builds paths or queries from values it is given. None of that is a flaw by itself — it becomes one when the code changes, and code changes quietly between releases. We re-read it on every one.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 0 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add fojin-mcp --transport http https://mcp.fojin.ai/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fojin-mcp": {
      "url": "https://mcp.fojin.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.fojin-mcp]
url = "https://mcp.fojin.ai/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fojin-mcp": {
      "url": "https://mcp.fojin.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fojin-mcp": {
      "url": "https://mcp.fojin.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 8

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

lookup
lookup_dictionary
Look up a Buddhist term across fojin's dictionaries (748K+ entries).
lookup_entity
Search fojin's knowledge graph for entities — people, places, works, doctrinal terms — matching `query`.
commentaries
commentaries
What the historical commentators said about a passage of Buddhist scripture. Give a line of a sūtra and get back the classical commentaries that gloss it — each with the commentator's own words, the work it comes from, a quality tier, and a resolvable citation. This is the layer no other tool exposes for the Chinese canon: CBETA marks up almost none of it, and the alignment behind this was derived text by text. Two things to read carefully rather than skim. `total` is how many commentators the passage actually has — `truncated` says the list you got is a sample. And coverage is partial: roughly half of what a commentator wrote is not aligned, so an absent commentator means "not in the data", never "he said nothing". When nothing matches, `available_sutras` tells you which sūtras have data at all — do not read a miss as silence from the tradition.
corpus
search_corpus
Semantic search across fojin's Buddhist corpus (10K+ texts, 30+ langs). Returns the most relevant passages, each with a `urn`, title, snippet and similarity score. `lang` optionally filters by language code (lzh=Classical Chinese, pi=Pali, sa=Sanskrit, bo=Tibetan, en=English).
parallels
get_parallels
Cross-canon parallel passages aligned to a fascicle. fojin's alignment moat: given a Chinese fascicle, returns the aligned Pali/Tibetan/Sanskrit parallels so you can compare how a passage is rendered across traditions. A fascicle returns parallels for the *whole* juan — often hundreds. To narrow them to one passage, match the passage against `source_chunks[].text` and keep the parallels whose `aligns_source_chunk` equals that chunk_index. `urn` is filled for parallels that are fojin works; rows with `source="mitra-parallel"` are inline Skt/Tib sentences with no fojin work to cite, so they carry `original_preview` instead and stay `urn: null`.
passage
read_passage
Read the full content of one fascicle (卷) of a text, with its `urn`. Use the `text_id`/`juan_num` from a search_corpus hit. Returns the actual canonical text — quote from this, not from memory.
resolve
resolve_urn
Resolve a fojin URN (e.g. fojin:cbeta/T0001.1) to a reader URL and confirm it exists in the corpus. Use to verify or dereference a citation.
verify
verify_quote
Verify that a Buddhist-canon quote exists VERBATIM in the corpus. Call this before presenting any quoted scripture to a reader: LLMs routinely invent plausible-looking quotes. Returns `verbatim` (bool), where it was found (`matches`, each with a resolvable `urn`), or the closest near-miss window when it wasn't. `cite` optionally narrows the search — a CBETA id ("T0374") or fojin URN ("fojin:cbeta/T0374.13") — and `cite_matched` reports honestly whether the quote is where you claimed (a hit in a different fascicle does NOT confirm your citation). Quote must be ≥4 CJK chars after normalisation; Classical Chinese only. Short quotes are answered but say less: a four-character phrase recurs across the canon, so read `cite_matched` rather than `verbatim`, and check `matches_capped` before treating the list as complete. Each match carries an absolute `reader_url` — cite that, not a reconstructed third-party link.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://mcp.fojin.ai/mcp streamable-http answering 933 ms 0 min ago

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fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools do?
It exposes 8 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: commentaries, get_parallels, lookup_dictionary, lookup_entity, read_passage, resolve_urn and 2 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 92 of 92 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 799 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools need an API key?
No. fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 8 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools?
It answers our handshake in 799 ms on average, which is faster than 14% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.
Is fojin — Buddhist Canon Tools open source?
Yes — it is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, written in Python, 343 stars on GitHub and 4 open issues. The source link is on this page, so you can read exactly what it does with your data before you connect it.