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Dharma Seed Teacher & Talk Archive Scraper

LEAD GENERATION
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Dharma Seed Teacher & Talk Archive Scraper

Scrape the complete Dharma Seed archive — the canonical repository of Western Insight/Vipassana meditation teaching. Returns structured profiles for 600+ teachers alongside their 30,000+ CC-licensed dharma talk recordings with direct audio download URLs.

What it returns

One record per teacher, each with embedded talk metadata:

Field Description
teacher_id Unique teacher ID from Dharma Seed
name Teacher full name
tradition Inferred tradition (Theravada, Zen, Tibetan, etc.)
center_affiliation Primary teaching center (IMS, Spirit Rock, Amaravati, etc.)
bio Full biography
photo_url URL to teacher photo on media.dharmaseed.org
profile_url Link to teacher profile page
talk_count Total number of recorded talks
retreat_count Number of retreats extracted from the teacher's talks
country Teacher's country
latest_talk_date Date of most recent recording (YYYY-MM-DD)
talks JSON array of talk objects — each with talk_id, title, audio_url, duration_min, recorded_date, venue_id, retreat_id

Input parameters

Parameter Type Default Description
maxItems integer 10 Maximum number of teacher records to collect
maxTalksPerTeacher integer 0 Max talks to include per teacher (0 = all talks)

Performance note: With maxTalksPerTeacher: 0 (all talks), a full archive run fetches ~30,000+ individual talk records. For quick lookups, set maxTalksPerTeacher: 10-50. For teacher profiles without talk details, set maxTalksPerTeacher: 0 and maxItems to your teacher count.

Example output

{
  "teacher_id": 4,
  "name": "Ajahn Amaro",
  "tradition": "Theravada",
  "center_affiliation": "Insight Meditation Society",
  "bio": "As co-abbot of Abhayagiri Monastery...",
  "photo_url": "https://media.dharmaseed.org/uploads/photos/teacher_4_125_0.png",
  "profile_url": "https://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/4/",
  "talk_count": 212,
  "retreat_count": 45,
  "country": "USA",
  "latest_talk_date": "2021-08-22",
  "talks": "[{\"talk_id\":68215,\"title\":\"Opening Reflections\",\"audio_url\":\"https://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/68215/...mp3\",\"duration_min\":41.9,\"recorded_date\":\"2021-08-21\",\"venue_id\":195,\"retreat_id\":4945}]"
}

Who uses this data

  • Meditation app content teams (Calm, Ten Percent Happier, Waking Up) sourcing CC-licensed teaching content
  • Podcast aggregators building dharma talk directories
  • Academic researchers in comparative religion, Buddhist studies
  • Journalists covering the Western vipassana movement
  • Teacher directories and listing sites

Source

All content from dharmaseed.org is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Use of audio content must comply with this license.

Notes

  • Teacher records without a public listing on Dharma Seed are automatically filtered
  • The tradition and center_affiliation fields are inferred from bio text — not stored explicitly by Dharma Seed
  • Audio URLs are direct MP3 download links (no authentication required)
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