dhamma
guide

I came to Dhamma as a young person, mostly out of necessity. I was struggling with mental health, with the ordinary agonies of attachment, and with a home life that wasn't always steady. Finding the teachings gave me a framework for understanding what I was experiencing — and, for the first time, a sense that there was a way through.

Since then I've been weaving Dhamma into my life in a mostly self-directed way, learning through reading, practice, and proximity to good teachers. Living in Ottawa, I've been fortunate to have Tisarana monastery close by — a Theravāda community in Ontario with deep roots in the Thai forest tradition. That proximity eventually led to extended stays there and at Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia, where I got my first real taste of what sustained monastic practice feels like.

More recently, I became a caregiver for my father through a terminal illness that came on suddenly and without warning. That experience cracked things open. The teachings I'd been working with intellectually became something I needed in a much more immediate way — a way to meet grief, impermanence, and a quality of suffering I hadn't had to face before. Caregiving brought me back to Dhamma more seriously than anything else had.

This project came out of all of that.

This project grew out of a specific gap I kept running into. I spent time living and practicing at a monastery, and even there — surrounded by people with deep experience — getting direct answers to practice questions wasn't always easy. Monastic life involves a lot of silence and independent work. You read, you sit, you figure things out mostly on your own. When questions did come up, the answer was usually "go read this."

Back in lay life, that gap only widened. I wanted something that could meet me at the end of a sit and help me think through what came up — not as a replacement for a teacher or a sangha, but as a knowledgeable companion. Something like a well-read friend who has studied the same teachers I have and can point me toward the relevant passage, the right chapter, the talk that addresses what I'm circling around.

Forums like Reddit's r/theravada or Dhamma Wheel fill some of this role, and they're genuinely useful. But I wanted something conversational, immediate, and drawn specifically from sources I already trust — not a crowd of strangers with varying levels of understanding, but the books already on my shelf.

Questions are converted into embeddings locally — nothing sent externally. The index returns the chunks most relevant in meaning, not just keyword matches.

Mention a sutta directly — "what does MN 10 say about mindfulness of the body?" — and chunks tagged with that reference are boosted automatically.

The model grounds every response in the retrieved passages and cites them inline. If a question wanders outside your corpus, it says so rather than confabulating.