Mainstreaming IKS in India – A Panel Discussion

A reflection on wonder, inquiry, and the civilization that never separated the two

– A Summary of the Panel Discussion

When people say “Indian Knowledge Systems,” I smile a little inside.

Not because the term is wrong. But because the words knowledge and system carry a certain weight in English that doesn’t quite capture what we’re pointing to. In many modern contexts, knowledge implies something we use to manipulate the world—to gain advantage, to extract, to control. And system sounds like a machine built for regulation. Put them together and you risk making something living sound bureaucratic.

So yes, IKS—as we now call it—may not be the most precise phrase. But we understand what people mean. And for many of us who grew up in this land, rooted in its soil and its culture, this is not a new system we recently discovered. We have been living it, often without naming it.

That was the spirit in the room at a recent panel discussion bringing together voices from philosophy, mathematics, and artificial intelligence—all attempting to answer the same simple question: what exactly is IKS, and why does it matter now? What followed was not a lecture. It was a manthan—a genuine churning, full of agreements and productive tensions, the kind that only happens when people who have spent real time with these traditions sit together and think out loud.

This is an attempt to preserve some of that thinking.

A Continuous Chain, Not a Museum Piece

Our ancestors, as part of an unbroken chain of people this land has produced, arrived into a world already in motion and paid close attention.

Imagine waking up in a place where everything is already happening. Beautiful mountains. Rivers that move with purpose. Forests that breathe. And then you discover something called hunger—but hunger that doesn’t arrive randomly. It comes cyclically. You eat, it goes away. Then it returns.

So you observe: there is repetition.

You notice it gets bright, then dark. The sun rises, the moon appears. Again—a cycle. The seasons turn, rivers flood and recede. Pattern. Order. Rhythm.

A mind that is truly awake starts to see that things are not unfolding in chaos. There is cyclicity. There is something that could only be called design.

And then the questions arise—not as intellectual exercises, but as genuine encounters with reality: Who created this? How did this begin? Is something thinking about me?

That last question is worth sitting with. Because when our ancestors noticed that they experienced hunger—and that creation had already provided something to satisfy it; that they needed shelter from the seasons—and that the materials to build it existed; it began to feel less like accident and more like intention. As if something in the universe was oriented toward their welfare.

One of the panelists put it plainly: IKS is not merely a collection of disciplines. It is the entire body of knowledge that emerged when people asked these questions seriously, across every domain of life—from the movement of stars to the architecture of sound, from the governance of society to the liberation of the individual. And crucially, it was generated right here, from this particular relationship between this land and the people it produced.

Wonder Before Knowledge

The most important response our ancestors had to what they encountered was not arrogance. Not conquest. Not the urge to control.

It was vismaya. Wonder.

“What an astonishing and beautiful thing this is.”

That sense of wonder is where every genuine inquiry begins. And from that place, many different schools of thought emerged. Because when human beings face the same profound questions, they don’t always arrive at the same answers—and that is not a failure. That is the sign of a civilization mature enough to hold multiple truths simultaneously.

Some said creation happened through an intelligent cause. Others said it unfolds on its own. Some made careful observations. Some developed methodologies of inquiry. Some did what we would today call experimentation. Over centuries and millennia, a certain understanding took shape—not as dogma, but as darshana. A way of seeing.

Rishis Didn’t Demand Belief—They Offered a Path

But here is what matters most.

They didn’t say: “This is what I saw. Now believe me.”

They said something far more radical—and far more mature:

“There is a path. If you walk it, you may come to see what I saw. You may experience what I experienced. You don’t have to trust me. Verify it yourself.”

At a deeper level of consciousness, what we call rishis perceived creation in ways that went far beyond ordinary observation. They perceived the whole—cause and effect, how things arise, how they unfold—almost as an integrated living reality.

That is the foundational principle of what we call IKS today. Not a collection of claims to be accepted on faith, but a civilization that built methods of arriving at truth. The knowledge that came from those methods was captured with great care—in sutras, in shastras, in oral traditions of astonishing precision. Behind it was not intellectual ambition alone. It came from compassion—the recognition that other people in society should also be able to access these insights and live from them. Not through belief. Through realization.

The Dharmic Dream: What Moksha Actually Means

One of the most striking moments in the discussion came when someone reframed the entire conversation around what our knowledge systems were ultimately for.

Look at the Upanishads. Look at the shastras. Almost every one of them starts with some version of jijñāsā—the burning desire to know. And what is the thing to be known? Not merely the mechanics of the universe, but the nature of consciousness itself. The final aim—moksha—is not an escape into nothingness. It is the recognition of something that has always already been present: a state of unbounded awareness that does not depend on anything external.

Mukti, as one panelist described it, is not gaining something. It is the shedding of everything you are not.

This is not a modest ambition. In fact, it is the most ambitious project any civilization has ever undertaken—to discover whether there exists a state of being so complete, so inherently whole, that it requires nothing from the outside world to sustain it. And the thesis of the entire tradition is: yes, such a state exists. It is not theoretical. It is experiential. And there are paths to it.

This shapes everything else. It explains why our ancestors were not primarily interested in dominating nature—not because they lacked the intellectual capacity to develop that path (anyone who reads the debates in the Vedanta tradition with honest attention will never make that mistake), but because they made a considered choice. If the deepest bliss does not come from extracting more from Prakriti, why go further down a road that binds you more deeply to what you are ultimately trying to transcend?

That is not passivity. That is clarity.

No False Divide Between This World and That

One confusion that keeps surfacing is the idea that our tradition was somehow split between the material world and the spiritual—that we had to choose between prosperity and liberation.

For us, this was never a contradiction.

Think about what you wish for the people you love. You wish them material prosperity. And you also wish them ultimate welfare—peace, fulfilment, freedom. Both. Simultaneously. You cannot have the wheat without the husk, and you cannot have only the husk. Spiritual evolution and material prosperity come together, like grain and its covering.

That is why our knowledge systems covered the full spectrum of life. We had frameworks for dharma—right conduct, social order, the ethical fabric of life. We had deep thinking on artha—economics, governance, the art of building flourishing societies. We had paths oriented toward moksha—the ultimate questions of existence and liberation. And we had multiple darshanas—schools of inquiry, each valid, each illuminating a different face of the same truth.

The narrative that we were only interested in the other world—that we ignored the material plane—was not something we concluded ourselves. It was installed in us. James Mill and those who followed him had reasons to construct that picture. It served particular purposes. What the postcolonial studies work has made increasingly clear is that the record tells a very different story: we excelled in both, and we pursued both as necessary.

The Lens You Use Determines What You See

One of the greatest challenges today is not a lack of information. It is the lens through which we approach it.

Before we evaluate anything—before we ask whether something is valid or superstitious or scientific—we must examine the mental models through which we are seeing. Because those models completely determine the answers we find.

Someone at the session said they were amazed we had such a vast knowledge system—but then immediately asked: “Why are people so superstitious?”

The response was worth noting: before you ask that question, write it down and examine it. What do you mean by superstitious? How did you arrive at that definition? What makes something superstitious to you, and what makes something else not superstitious? Where did this question come from? Was it yours? Or was it planted in you?

This is difficult work. But it is necessary work. Because the most dangerous questions are the ones we never think to question at all.

The Panchakosha framework offers one way to see this clearly. Most modern Western inquiry tends to stop at the Annamaya level—the domain of the physical and the sensory. Our inquiry goes further. We understood that there are ways of knowing that go beyond the senses. And that is where much of the apparent conflict arises.

Is yoga not science? The answer depends entirely on what you define as science, what methodologies you consider legitimate, and what you accept as valid evidence. Define the terms, and the argument often dissolves.

An Empirical and Computational Tradition

Perhaps the sharpest correction the discussion offered was to the commonly held idea that the Indian tradition was somehow non-empirical—more mystical than methodical.

The reality is almost the opposite.

In astronomy, our ancestors did not begin with beautiful abstractions about what shapes God might prefer. The Greeks, for all their brilliance, started there—if circles are perfect, surely the heavens must move in circles; if God is rational, surely the cosmos must reflect that rationality. The Indian astronomers simply looked. They observed celestial bodies and their movements over sustained periods, sometimes entire lifetimes. They recorded. They calculated. And when their calculations didn’t match what they observed, they revised their calculations.

One panelist described this as a computational positivist epistemology—an approach grounded in observation and mathematical calculation, with no prior metaphysical commitments required to begin the inquiry. What is remarkable is that this happens to be precisely the methodology that modern computational science has converged on. Not because we are reading ancient ideas backwards into contemporary frameworks, but because the approach is simply more rigorous.

The Indian number system—the numerals from one to nine and the zero—made this possible. With a number system capable of representing any quantity with ease and precision, Indian mathematicians could work with very large numbers in both numerators and denominators, performing astronomical calculations of a precision that the Greeks, with their geometric abstractions, could not match.

And the algorithms encoded in sutra literature—for calculating powers, for extracting greatest common divisors, for solving indeterminate equations—are genuine algorithms in the modern sense. They encode methods, step by step. The reason students learned them by heart was not blind obedience. It was because an algorithm you carry in your body cannot be corrupted by a careless scribe. The oral tradition’s metric constraints were not a limitation—they were a verification mechanism. You cannot accidentally change a Sanskrit verse bound by its meter without everyone immediately knowing.

The same care applied to causal attribution. Indian logicians were famously cautious about claiming to have identified a cause—not because they were incurious, but because they understood how easy it is to attribute false causes. That epistemological caution is, as one panelist noted, one of the central problems in modern machine learning today. Correlation is not causation, and it turns out our ancestors thought very hard about that distinction centuries ago.

The Pramanas: Multiple Valid Ways of Knowing

What distinguishes the Indian epistemological tradition is not just what it knew, but how it thought about knowing.

The concept of pramanas—valid sources of knowledge—was not a peripheral concern. Every major school of thought engaged with it seriously. The commonly accepted ones include pratyaksha (direct perception), anumana (inference), and shabda (testimony from reliable sources). Some schools added others—including yogic pratyaksha, a form of direct perception available to a consciousness that has been refined through sustained practice.

One panelist made an elegant point: map the Indian epistemological methods onto a formal mathematical proof, and you find the same structure. Statement, grounds, a demonstration that the grounds support the statement, examples that confirm it, and the conclusion restated. This is not coincidence. It is the sign of a tradition that took the structure of valid reasoning just as seriously as any formal logical system.

The difference is that the Indian tradition also recognized the limits of purely propositional reasoning—that certain domains of reality require a different instrument of knowing, the way certain physical phenomena require instruments the naked eye cannot provide. This is not anti-rational. It is simply a more complete account of what knowing actually involves.

IKS in Education Is Not About Swapping Content

When it comes to integrating IKS into education, this needs to be said clearly: it is not as simple as replacing Western content with Indian content.

IKS is not primarily about content.

It is about pedagogy. It is about the person standing in front of you.

Look at the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna could have told Arjuna: “Just stop asking questions and fight.” But he didn’t. He took eighteen chapters. He answered in so many different ways, through so many different frameworks. He never grew impatient with Arjuna’s persistent questioning.

Why? Because he genuinely wanted Arjuna to understand. He was truly invested in the progress of that person.

That intention—it is my dharma to enable the flowering of this individual in every possible way—is the starting point of IKS in education. Every methodology, every pedagogical tool, flows from that intention.

Start With the Child in Front of You

There is a story from direct experience that captures this better than any theory.

A session with children—the topic was supposed to be Indian culture. But the children were completely restless. This was just after COVID. Some couldn’t sit still. Some were practically rolling on the floor.

And they were aware of it themselves. They said: “I can’t control my mind. Help me.”

In that moment, the curriculum became irrelevant. The problem was right there, in the room, in those bodies, in those restless minds.

So the session was reframed entirely. “Your mind is a pet. Let’s figure out how to train it.”

The children named the pet. Drew it. Described how it behaves—unruly, unpredictable, refuses to listen. Then: “What do you want your pet to do?” They made a list. Then: “Now speak to your pet. Tell it what you want.”

To do that, they had to close their eyes and turn inward. They were meditating—but the word meditation was never used. By the end, the stillness in the room was palpable.

That is pedagogy. Activating the learner. Being genuinely interested in whether this person is actually growing.

Another practice worth mentioning: ask children to bring a question—not an answer. A question that truly matters to them. Something their parents, their teachers, nobody has been able to answer, but that lives in them.

An eleven-year-old girl once asked: “Have we stopped evolving as human beings? Can we evolve beyond this?” That is Sri Aurobindo-level inquiry.

A five-year-old asked: “Why do we sleep?” That is a Stanford PhD-level question.

The capacity is there. It just needs to be drawn out, not suppressed.

Why Inquiry Was Systematically Suppressed

The current state of education did not arise by accident.

The mass education system installed in India around 1835 was designed for a specific purpose: to produce obedient clerks for a large bureaucracy, and reliable factory workers for an industrial economy. That system was explicitly built to suppress questioning. Uniform, compliance, repetition—not because these are virtuous in themselves, but because they served an administrative need.

Several generations passed through that system. It was glorified. Many families still see it as the path to security. And the result—as the discussion made plain—is a classroom culture that systematically stops the very jijñāsā that makes knowledge transfer real.

In the shastra tradition, when a student asked a question, the teacher’s first response was often: “Sādhu! What a wonderful question.” The better the question, the more the student was praised—not for having the right answer, but for having the genuine desire to know. The teacher who couldn’t answer a student’s question didn’t cover it up. He said: “You have asked something I cannot answer. Let both of us go and find out.”

That openness—that honesty about the limits of one’s own knowing—is not weakness. It is the very thing that allows knowledge to move.

One panelist shared that in over a decade of teaching, he offers students a reward whenever they ask a question he cannot answer. It has happened nine times. All nine questions became published research.

That is what incentivizing inquiry looks like.

“Learning by Heart” Was Misunderstood

The phrase learning by heart deserves careful attention, because it has been badly misread.

When missionaries arrived in India and saw Gurukula students chanting texts, they assumed it was the same as the practice of rote memorization they’d grown up opposing back home in Britain. They called it mechanical. They called it mindless.

But our method was never just memorization. It was śravaṇa, manana, nididhyāsana.

First, śravaṇa—deep listening, receiving. Not passive hearing, but attentive presence to what is being transmitted.

Then manana—thinking it through, sitting with it, letting it work on you. Not accepting it on authority, but genuinely interrogating it from every angle until it either breaks or holds.

Then nididhyāsana—internalizing it so completely that it becomes how you live. Not performance. Not demonstration. Actualization.

Yes, learning the Bhagavad Gita by heart is valuable. Now it lives inside you, available whenever you need it. But that is only the beginning. What follows is contemplation, integration, and actualization. A complete circle. Not mere repetition.

The sutra form itself made this possible. Sutras encode vast amounts of high-level knowledge in a few words—not to make comprehension easy, but to make it portable. You carry the seed everywhere with you. The unpacking of that seed is the work of a lifetime.

Language Carries Civilization

There is also the question of language—and this is not a sentimental point.

Language is not a neutral vehicle for meaning. Language shapes cognition. It carries culture. It carries a worldview embedded so deep that you cannot separate the words from the way of seeing.

Certain insights cannot be fully transmitted through a language built for entirely different assumptions about reality. Some things are genuinely lost in translation—not because the translator failed, but because the original lived in a different universe of meaning. The word dharma is a good example. The word rta. The word moksha. These are not just concepts to be replaced by English equivalents. They are entire orientations toward reality.

Promoting Indian languages in education is not a step backward. It is a step toward wholeness—toward a form of thinking that the language itself makes possible.

Shastras Are Not Supplements

One final point from the discussion, and perhaps the most important one for those thinking seriously about how to bring IKS into institutions.

Don’t integrate IKS into the curriculum and stop there.

The real call is to study the shastras—for the sake of the shastras. Not as supplements to a Western curriculum, not as decorative references to prove that we also had mathematics. But as living bodies of knowledge that are worthy of sustained, rigorous, devoted engagement on their own terms.

The Gurukula tradition was not a mass system. It was an intimate transmission. One teacher. A handful of students. A relationship that lasted years. What was transmitted was not merely information. It was a way of being—a way of questioning, a way of sitting with difficulty, a way of knowing that you don’t yet know.

That cannot be entirely replicated in a classroom. But some of it can be preserved. Every household, every serious educator, has the responsibility to go deeply into at least one shastra—not for certification, not for competitive advantage, but for the thing itself.

Because once you’ve spent real time inside even one classical text with genuine intention, something shifts. You start to see differently. Not because the text told you to. But because the sustained encounter with that level of thinking changes the quality of your own.

A Living Continuum

So when we speak of Indian Knowledge Systems, we are not speaking of a dead archive.

We are speaking of a living continuum—a civilization that responded to existence with wonder, built methods of inquiry, captured insight with rigor, and shared it with compassion. Not so that the next person would believe truth, but so they would have a way to arrive at it themselves.

If we are serious about bringing IKS into education, into our institutions, into our lives, we must begin not by swapping textbooks but by restoring something deeper: the intention, the pedagogy, the language, and above all, the frameworks through which we define knowledge itself.

The restoration of those frameworks is not nostalgia. It is not nationalism. It is not a rejection of modern science.

It is the recognition that one of the most sophisticated civilizations in human history developed methods of inquiry, systems of reasoning, and frameworks for living that have not been superseded—only forgotten.

And remembering is always possible.

This article draws on a panel discussion on IKS bringing together practitioners of philosophy, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. The views represent the collective texture of that conversation rather than any single voice.