You can always access the Lucene directories through plain Lucene, the Directory structure is in no way different with or without Hibernate Search. However there are some more convenient ways to access a given Directory. The SearchFactory keeps track of the DirectoryProviders per indexed class. One directory provider can be shared amongst several indexed classes if the classes share the same underlying index directory. While usually not the case, a given entity can have several DirectoryProviders if the index is sharded (see Section 3.2, “Sharding indexes”).

DirectoryProvider[] provider = searchFactory.getDirectoryProviders(Order.class);
org.apache.lucene.store.Directory directory = provider[0].getDirectory();

In this example, directory points to the lucene index storing Orders information. Note that the obtained Lucene directory must not be closed (this is Hibernate Search responsibility).