I there a way to search the lucene index created by hibernate-search without knowledge of a lucene query.

I.E. I have read that you need to create a lucene query and then create a hibernate query to wrap that lucene query to get back entities that match your search criteria.

No, currently there is not way around creating a Lucene query. We are considering/working on a programmatic API for querying, but that's still experimental. The idea is to hide the construction of the Lucene query behind a fluent and type safe Hibernate Search specific API.

That said, is there a particular reason you are asking this question?

Thanks.

Yeah the only reason I was asking was it seems strange that the lucene API was hidden (wrapped) when creating the index, but not when trying to access the index. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't doing things the hard way by using the lucene API to create a lucene query. ( i hate doing extra work if its not necessary :) )

BTW have you seen this post I cannot get anyone to respond, is it a dumb question?
https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1001680