Parallels

Parallels database last updated 2025-09-15 09:38.

This interface allows you to look for parallel verse passages—verses, hemistiches or pādas—in the DHARMA texts collection. Parallels are found with an approximate matching technique which is described below. You can either input a passage to look for in the form below, or browse the collection with the table at the bottom of this page.

You should always input a complete passage—verse, hemistich or pāda, depending on the unit you choose. This interface is not meant to be used for searching arbitrary substrings.

The table at the bottom of this page displays, for each text that has at least one parallel, the number of verses, hemistiches and pādas it contains that have parallels in the DHARMA collection.

Verse passages that are encoded in a weird way are omitted from parallels. Please use one <l> element per pāda, and number pādas with lowercase ASCII letters in alphabet order, without gaps in the numbering.

Currently, we ignore the fact that parallels might cross verse boundaries. To be more explicit: when looking for parallels of a given verse, we compare it to verses 1, 2, 3, etc. of each text, but we do not try to compare it to 1cd-2ab, 2cd-3ab, etc. This might be changed in the future.

The similarity measure we are currently using for comparing passages is the Jaccard index J, computed over sets of character trigrams. J = 1 when passages share the exact same set of trigrams, J = 0 when they do not share a single one. We (arbitrarily) assume that pairs of passages for which J < 0.3 are not parallels, and do not display them. See here for details.