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Ask grounded questions

Ask (/ask) is a grounded chat over the library: answers are retrieved from corpus passages and should cite what they use.

  1. Click New chat / open Ask in the left rail, or ask from the home composer.
  2. Type a question a passage can support — e.g. doctrine, wording, or “where does X appear?”
  3. Send. Follow citation links into the reader.

Previous chats appear in the left rail under your conversation list (when signed in / local reader).

Ask can scope retrieval and prompting toward a tradition (early Buddhist, Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna, Śaiva, etc., depending on configuration). Pick a mode that matches the corpus you want answers from so results stay on-tradition.

Each assistant reply can show a trust status summarizing how tightly the answer is grounded — for example whether sources were found, citations were corrected, or quotes were adjusted. Treat this as honesty about retrieval quality, not a claim that the content is doctrinally “true.”

Details: Trust & grounding.

  • Prefer questions answerable from texts (“What does SN 12.2 list as the twelve links?”).
  • Name a work or tradition when you know it.
  • Use reader Ask AI on a selection when you already have a passage open.

Operators can require login for AI and set day/week quotas. If you hit a limit, sign in or wait for the window to reset.