A reader’s aid that shows its sources
Vidyacharya helps you study the Bhagavad Gita. It is an educational tool — not a teacher, not a guru, and not a religious authority. It never speaks for a tradition, and it says so when the text does not answer a question.
Where the text comes from
Every verse comes from one edition: Annie Besant’s The Bhagavad-Gita, 4th edition, 1922, which prints the Sanskrit in Devanagari beside an English translation. The text was transcribed and proofread by volunteers at English Wikisource.
Public domain in the United States, where it was published before 1931, and in India, where the translator’s death in 1933 put it out of copyright.
Modern translations are not used, however freely they can be read online, because reading something is not the same as having the right to republish it.
The transcription has a few flaws, and they are shown rather than hidden. Where a verse number was missing or wrong, it was assigned from the verse’s position and the verse page says so. The edition also omits one speaker line, before 6.33. Who is speaking is therefore taken from the Sanskrit, which prints every one.
How an answer is made
Your question is matched against all 701 verses, by meaning and by wording. If you name a verse, such as “BG 2.47”, that verse is fetched directly.
The verses found are shown first, exactly as printed, on a solid ribbon. Then an AI writes an explanation from those verses alone, on a dashed ribbon, with a flag on each claim naming the verse it rests on. Any citation that does not match a verse actually found is removed before you see it.
The AI never writes verse text. Everything you read in the record typeface came from the edition.
What it cannot do
It holds one translation and no commentary yet, so it cannot show how different traditions read a verse. It cannot answer from other texts, such as the Upanishads or the Mahabharata, and it says so if asked.
The explanation is written by an AI. Its citations are checked against the verses found, but an AI can still misread a verse. Read the recorded verse, and treat the explanation as a starting point.
It runs on free services with daily limits. At busy times, or late in the day, it may ask you to try again later.
What happens to your question
To answer, your question is sent to OpenRouter, which passes it to the AI models that match it against the verses and write the explanation. Their own policies apply to what they receive.
Vidyacharya does not store your question. It records only anonymous measurements — how long an answer took, how many verses were found, whether it declined — with no question text, no account and no address.
To limit how often anyone can ask, your network address is combined with a secret and scrambled before it is used, so the address itself is never kept.
The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which, like any web host, handles your connection and keeps routine technical logs.