BDRC/palri-parkhang-transcriptions

Tibetan OCR — Palri Parkhang

11,133 page images of Tibetan text with page-level Unicode transcriptions, mostly dbu-med (u-med) manuscripts with a small uchen portion.

The transcriptions were produced by Palri Parkhang, an input project led by Chris Tomlinson (former BDRC's CTO) in Nepal in 2006-2013 and aligned to BDRC scans; the material is largely Nyingma collected works and gter ma cycles. The transcriptions prioritized legibility over fidelity to the enscribed text and all the orthographic shorthands in the original are expanded in the transcription.

The original etexts were already distributed by BDRC, this is a version that includes the following changes:

• etext aligned page by page with the images, checked manually
• line breaks inserted manually
• manual filtering of pages that are deemed too distant from the original scans

These changes were implemented in a collaboration between BDRC and Dharmaduta in the context of the project "The BDRC Etext Corpus", a grant by the Khyentse Foundation.

Part of the BDRC Tibetan OCR release; see the model BDRC/tibetan-ocr and the evaluation benchmark.

At a glance

Images (pages)	11,133
Total size	1.79 GiB
Script	u-med (10,341) + uchen (792)
Technology	manuscript (11,133)
Writing styles (script_4)	danyig/pedri (6,786) · multi-script (2,763) · gyuyig/tsugdri (586) · druma (176) · other/blank (27)
Source of images	BDRC scans
Source of transcriptions	Palri Parkhang
License	CC0-1.0

Contents & schema

One row per page. Columns:

Column	Description
image	embedded page scan (HF Image)
transcription	Tibetan Unicode ground truth
id	unique row id
mw_id	BDRC version id of the source volume
technology	manuscript
script	ume / uchen
script_4	writing-style family (when available)

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("BDRC/palri-parkhang", split="train")
print(ds[0]["transcription"]); ds[0]["image"]

Splits

Single train split (training resource). For held-out evaluation use the separate BDRC Tibetan OCR benchmark.

License, attribution & image rights

• License: CC0-1.0 — use, modify, redistribute freely.
• Attribution requested (not required): please cite the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) and Palri Parkhang.
• ⚠ Image-rights disclaimer: BDRC claims no copyright over the scans, but verifying the copyright status of each underlying original book is the user's responsibility.

Citation

@misc{bdrc_palri_parkhang_2026,
  title  = {Tibetan OCR --- Palri Parkhang (dbu-med manuscripts)},
  author = {Palri Parkhang and Buddhist Digital Resource Center},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {Hugging Face},
  note   = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/BDRC/palri-parkhang}
}