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)