The chatbot answering modern-day questions about an ancient religion

JainGPT, a chatbot launched in 2023, is a tool designed for followers of Jainism as well as non-Jains to learn more about Jainism, the ancient religion founded around the 7th century B.C. in eastern India. The chatbot can answer questions ranging from “What is Jainism?” to “What causes karma to attach to the soul?” and “What happens after we die?”

At the core of Jainism is the belief that nonviolence, or ahimsa , is the path to liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. India has a 4.5 million-strong Jain population, with a diaspora around the world, including in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. But Jain religious texts are not easily accessible outside of libraries, temple repositories, and organizations like Jain eLibrary .

“The younger population, especially, needed an easier way to ask questions and get their answers directly from the scriptures and other works,” Anish Visaria, creator of JainGPT, told Rest of World .

Visaria is also the director of innovation at Jain eLibrary, an organization based between India and the U.S. In 2008, Jain eLibrary started a project to make Jain texts more accessible, by digitizing ancient manuscripts, books, articles, audio files, and scriptures. When Visaria joined the team in 2020, he used optical character recognition to pull raw text from over 4 million scanned pages, he said. He used it to build Jain Quantum — a search engine similar to Google, which has had 790,000 users in the past year — followed by JainGPT in 2023.

“The goal is to make Jain literature accessible worldwide. And also to promote Jain literature studies among younger generations and university academics,” Visaria said.

Since its launch in 2023, JainGPT has had 22,000 users, most of whom are between 14 and 35 years old. Popular questions range from the meanings of specific prayers and rituals to the history of Jainism and stories about Jain monks. “The feedback has been really positive, even though JainGPT is just using a semantic search right now,” Visaria said. “It’s not a large language model, so it doesn’t give answers in natural language yet. That’s the next step.” He said he was surprised to find the users included a wide range of people. “It’s not just Jains who use it; it’s also researchers and professors, people who are interested in learning from primary sources,” Visaria said.

Satej Shah, 25, told Rest of World that he has used JainGPT regularly since it first launched. The Chicago resident uses it for his presentations on the religion at Young Jains of America (YJA) conventions and retreats and at the Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago. “I’ve asked basic questions like, who is the 21st Tirthankara [a supreme spiritual teacher] but also complex questions like how to apply the four components of purushartha [purpose of human beings] to my daily life,” he said. “It really helps to explain the meaning behind many rituals.”

Austin-based Ketan Kapasi said he uses it to find translated versions of Jain prayers. “I also have so many questions about karma theory,” he told Rest of World . “This way I can get them answered instantly instead of waiting to ask someone and eventually forgetting about it.”

Jain eLibrary has had some pushback from followers who believe that certain canonical scriptures, called agamas , should be read only by monks and therefore not be made available online. Shah pointed out that “in the U.S., we’re not around monks 24/7. So technology has enabled us to find resources, learn, and connect.” ▰

Nadia Nooreyezdan is an independent journalist based in New Delhi.