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Answer
The answer is written by an AI from the passages retrieved above. Figures in brackets are coordinates you can check; the underlined ones open the original text. Treat the canon itself as authoritative — verify a coordinate before you cite it.
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How AskTipitaka answers
You ask in English; it goes looking in the Pāli canon itself and tells you what it found. Four things happen in between:
- 1. Work out which Pāli words to search for. The canon is in Pāli and your question is in English, so the first step is not a search — it is deciding what to search for. Many English Buddhist terms sit close to the Pāli (mindfulness → sati, dependent origination → paṭiccasamuppāda), and that is what this step leans on.
- 2. Search the Pāli text itself. No translation in between — two translations of one sutta can differ widely, and what you read is the translator's choice. Translations are here to help you read, not to ground the answer. One word appears in dozens of inflected forms, and all of them have to be found.
- 3. Answer only from what came back. Nothing is filled in from memory.
- 4. Check it once more before handing it over. Every coordinate in the answer
(those numbers like
14:206) is taken back to the source text and compared. Anything that does not match is removed, not quietly left in.
- The coordinates are clickable. One tap shows you that passage of Pāli — you do not have to trust it, because you can go and look.
- Layers are marked. Every citation says whether it comes from the mūla, the aṭṭhakathā or the ṭīkā. The Theravāda tradition holds the ācariyas' determinations in high regard, and they are a distinct layer from the mūla — marking which is which tells you where a passage sits, and that is all the mark is for.
What it is not
- Not a teacher. It answers one kind of question: where the passage is, and what the passage says.
- Possibly incomplete. The canon is large, and one search brings back only a few dozen passages — not finding something is not the same as it not being there.
- The search itself can land off-target. Ask the same thing a different way and it may find different passages. If an answer does not satisfy you, rephrase it and search again.
This note is the 3 October 2026 version. The pipeline is still being worked on, and this page is updated along with it.