Ask the texts

Type a question or a reference such as BG 2.47 or ChU 6.8.7. Replies quote only verses held in the Library (532 texts, 7,62,517 verses), each with its reference and a link to read it in place. When the texts do not cover a question, the reply says so rather than inventing a verse. At present replies show the matching verses without written commentary.

What you write about your own life is not stored. Questions about the texts are kept without your name, to improve the search.

Or start from a theme

How replies are checked

  1. A reference is parsed exactly and fetched directly; there is no guessing between editions.
  2. Otherwise the question is matched against the verses with a full-text index, in Sanskrit and in the held English.
  3. If the best match covers too little of the question, the reply says the texts do not cover it.
  4. When an answer engine is configured, it sees only the retrieved verses and may quote only those.
  5. Every quoted verse is compared, character by character, with the corpus; anything that does not match is removed before you see it.

Sources and licences for every text are listed on the sources page; the method is written up in the method notes.