Discovery pathways

Dharmalib is most useful when a route through the data begins with a real question. Here are several reliable paths.

From a passage to a lexical family

Open a text, select a meaningful word, and inspect its lemma. From there, open its root if one is supplied. Compare the root’s derived words, then return to passages in more than one text. This is a good route for questions about verbal imagery, semantic change, or technical vocabulary.

From a lemma to its contexts

Use the dictionary or word entry to find a lemma, then inspect its occurrence and concordance information. Open examples in different texts and genres. Ask what changes: morphology, neighbouring words, genre, doctrinal setting, or translation choices.

From a text class to a comparison set

In the text catalogue, choose a class and select a few texts with different dates, genres, or traditions. Use the same lemma or root as a thread between them. The class filter gives you a manageable comparison set without claiming that all texts in a class are alike.

From a concept to a reading list

Concept entries connect lexical material through the available semantic data. Use them as prompts for exploration rather than as final philosophical categories. Follow member lemmas into actual text contexts, then collect a small set of passages for comparison.

Notable lemmas

A text’s notable lemmas are a curated signal of semantically distinctive or salient vocabulary in that text. They intentionally exclude routine particles, pronouns, demonstratives, and similar high-frequency grammatical words. They are starting points for reading, not a substitute for a text’s central themes.

Keep a question visible

Useful exploratory questions are concrete: “How is this root used in ritual and philosophical prose?”, “Which words cluster around this concept?”, or “How does a term’s grammar differ across two genres?” The interface makes it easy to wander; a question makes wandering cumulative.