People ask me for my recipes all the time. I share them willingly — the ingredients, the quantities, the sequence, even the timing. And yet, almost invariably, they come back and say, “I tried it, but it doesn’t taste the way yours does.”

I used to wonder why. Now I know. A recipe is a description of a dish. It is not the dish itself. And the gap between those two things — between the description and the reality — is where most of what we call knowledge actually lives.

This is not a small gap. It is where the entire question of what is “practical” and what is “theory” plays out, every single day, in every conversation, meeting, classroom, and kitchen.

The Court That Never Closes

The human mind is a relentless court of judgment. It never really goes off duty. It is constantly processing, sorting, classifying, and filing. And the filing system it uses is not neutral — it is built entirely from the past.

In the Vedāntic framework, the Antaḥkaraṇa — the inner instrument — has four interlocking functions. The manas receives and processes sensory input. The buddhi discriminates and decides. The ahaṃkāra, the I-sense, personalises everything — it makes every experience mine. And the citta is the vast store of impressions — the saṃskāras — that accumulate over a lifetime, and if our tradition is to be taken seriously, over many lifetimes before this one.

It is the citta that concerns us most here. Because it is from the citta that the mind draws its references when it encounters something new. Every experience you have ever had — every conversation, every failure, every moment of betrayal or breakthrough — has been encoded into a pattern. The mind extracts from that experience a kind of lesson: “when A happened, B followed.” It constructs a story, gives that story a moral, and stores the moral as a mental model. Henceforth, whenever it detects anything resembling A, it reaches automatically for B.

This is what we call experience. This is also what we call intuition. And this is, in many cases, precisely the thing that prevents us from seeing what is actually in front of us.

Here is something worth pausing on: the logic that the mind applies in this court is not the perfect instrument we imagine it to be. The writer and philosopher David Cycleback points out that all human logic rests on unprovable axioms — foundational assumptions that we accept not because they have been proven, but because they seem coherent or useful. The logician Kurt Gödel demonstrated, with mathematical rigour, that in any sufficiently complex logical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system. No framework, however carefully constructed, can encapsulate all truths.

What this means in practice is quietly unsettling. The verdicts the mind reaches — this is practical, this is not; this works, this does not — are not the output of a perfect reasoning machine. They are conclusions drawn within a system that is itself constrained by its own premises. You cannot see outside the frame using only the tools that the frame provides.

I wrote about this at length in my earlier piece, A Note on Mental Models and Perception. The mental models we carry are not neutral lenses. They are stained glass — they colour everything that passes through them, and we rarely notice the colour because we have never seen the world without it.

The Inner Interrogation Room

Sit across someone who is presenting a proposal, an idea, a collaboration. Watch what happens inside you — not on the surface, where you are nodding politely or asking questions, but beneath that, where the real processing is taking place.

The mind is simultaneously running multiple threads. Who is this person, really? What is his angle? Can I trust him? Is what he is saying true, and how would I even verify that? Is it possible? Has anything like this worked before? Have I seen it fail? What does my gut say? And lurking beneath all of this — what does this mean for me?

None of this is bad. All of it is human. The problem is when we mistake this internal tribunal for objective assessment. We are not evaluating the proposal on its merits alone. We are evaluating it through the accumulated weight of everything that has ever happened to us.

Research in cognitive psychology has a name for one of the key mechanisms at work here: the availability heuristic. We assess the probability or plausibility of something based on how easily we can recall relevant examples from memory. If we have seen a similar idea fail — even once, even under entirely different conditions — that memory becomes the most available reference point, and it dominates the evaluation. The new situation does not get a fair hearing. It gets the verdict that the most memorable past situation earned.

Compounding this is what researchers call the false-consensus effect: a well-documented tendency to overestimate how widely our own beliefs and experiences are shared. When someone says, “In my experience, this approach doesn’t work,” there is often an implicit assumption that their experience is representative — that what held true for them, in their context, with their constraints, reflects some broader truth. It rarely does. But the ahaṃkāra, the I-sense, finds it very difficult to believe otherwise.

There is also egocentric processing at work — the mind’s tendency to attend selectively to experiences that confirm what it already believes. It is not that disconfirming evidence is never encountered; it is that it is weighted less, remembered less vividly, and retrieved less readily. The citta stores all experience, but it serves the ahaṃkāra preferentially.

As I explored in You Only See What You Are Ready to See, our readiness to receive a new idea is itself conditioned by where we are in our own journey. The proposal does not land on a blank surface. It lands on a surface already covered in writing.

I Already Tried That Tea

Someone tells you there is a tea that can help with a health issue you have been carrying for years. Your immediate response: “I tried that already. It didn’t work.”

Here is the question worth sitting with: are you certain it is the same tea?

A medicinal herbal tea is not a simple object. It carries what I would call ingredient complexity — the specific variety of herb, the soil in which it grew, the season in which it was harvested, the age of the dried leaves, the mineral content of the water used to brew it. It also carries dynamic complexity — the temperature of the water, how long it steeps, whether it is covered or open, the sequence in which multiple herbs are combined, the vessel in which it is made.

Change any one of these variables and you have, in a meaningful sense, a different preparation. The name remains the same. The experience may be entirely different.

Cognitive research describes this as the description-experience gap. Information received as a description — reading about something, being told about it, seeing it summarised — is processed very differently by the mind than information gained through direct, embodied experience. When you say “I tried that tea,” you are drawing on an experiential memory. But the person offering the tea is often speaking from a different experiential tradition entirely. You are not, in fact, comparing the same thing. You are comparing two descriptions of things that may share only a name.

The mind, of course, does not see it this way. The mind heard “tea for this condition,” matched it to a prior experience labelled “tea for this condition,” retrieved the verdict from the citta — “did not work” — and closed the case. The entire process took perhaps a second. The new information was never really received because the mental model had already processed it out of existence.

This is what Māyā actually looks like in daily life. Not some grand cosmic illusion, but the quiet, efficient way in which the mind substitutes its memory of a thing for the thing itself. As I wrote in Cutting Through the Misty Veil of Māyā, the mind creates its own bondage through precisely this mechanism — assumption masquerading as experience.

What the Recipe Cannot Carry

Let me stay with the kitchen metaphor for a moment, because it is rich enough to bear the weight of this idea.

When someone asks me for a recipe and I share it, I am transmitting information. Ingredient names, measurements, sequence, time. What I am not — cannot — transmit in that transaction is the knowledge that lives in my hands. The fact that how vegetables are cut matters enormously, not just aesthetically but chemically. The surface area exposed determines how the vegetable releases moisture, how it absorbs the oil, how it caramelises or softens. The variety of eggplant in Bengaluru is not the same as the variety in Udupi, and they do not behave the same way in a pan. The cooking vessel — a heavy-bottomed kadai, a pressure cooker, a thin steel pot — changes the thermal dynamics of the entire preparation. The oil matters. The flame matters. Whether you add salt early or late matters.

I can write none of this into a recipe without making it a textbook. And even then, the person reading it would need to cook the dish perhaps fifty times before the knowledge stopped living in their head and began living in their hands.

This is the distinction the Indian knowledge tradition has always understood — the difference between śravaṇa (hearing or reading), manana (deep reflection), and nididhyāsana (sustained, embodied practice). Knowledge received at the level of śravaṇa is information. Knowledge that has passed through manana and nididhyāsana is understanding. And understanding, over time and with refinement, becomes what the tradition calls jñāna — not merely knowing, but being.

When someone labels something “theoretical” and dismisses it, what they usually mean is: “I have not yet embodied this knowledge.” Which is different, quite substantially different, from saying the knowledge is wrong.

When Experience Itself Becomes the Obstacle

There is a subtler problem underneath all of this, and it deserves its own space.

We tend to treat personal experience as the most reliable form of knowledge — the gold standard against which all other information is measured. And in many ordinary situations, it functions well as such. But researchers at IIT Jodhpur, studying how people draw on different sources of knowledge when making decisions, point out something that should give us pause: personal experience is most limited precisely in the moments that matter most.

They describe what they call “transformative decisions” — choices that fundamentally alter the decision-maker’s life in ways they cannot fully anticipate beforehand. Choosing a career direction. Starting a new kind of enterprise. Moving across cultures. Adopting a radically different approach to health or practice. These are the decisions where personal experience is least available and least reliable as a guide — because by definition, the person has not yet lived what they are considering. And yet these are also the decisions where people feel most compelled to reject external input and rely on the thin evidence of what they have already done.

This creates what might be called an epistemological tragedy. The moments when we most need to hold our prior experience lightly are precisely the moments when we are most likely to grip it tightly.

Cycleback raises a related point from the side of logic rather than experience. Binary thinking — the classification of things as either true or false, practical or theoretical, working or not working — is deeply embedded in classical logical reasoning. But many real-world situations involve ambiguity, degrees of truth, and variables that do not resolve into clean categories. A herbal preparation that works for one constitution may be genuinely neutral for another and mildly harmful for a third. A pedagogical method that electrifies one classroom may leave another unmoved. The binary verdict — this works, this does not — does violence to this complexity. It imposes a rigid frame on a reality that does not fit inside it.

And there is something else: logic, as Cycleback observes, is inherently context-dependent. The moment you abstract away context to achieve a general conclusion — “this method does not work” — you risk making a statement that is technically valid within your experience but misleading when applied elsewhere. What we call general principles are often highly localised truths that have been unwittingly promoted.

The tradition of India has always known this. The insistence on guru-paramparā — on the transmission of knowledge through a living lineage, not through text alone — is precisely an acknowledgement that context cannot be abstracted away. The Āyurvedic physician does not prescribe a herb; she prescribes a herb for this person, this prakriti, this season, this stage of life. The abstraction of the general formula is always a beginning, never an end.

The Same Curriculum, Not the Same Classroom

I have been thinking about this in the context of teaching. Two teachers — equally qualified, equally sincere, covering identical material. The outcomes in their classrooms may be completely different. I have seen this enough times to know it is not an anomaly. It is the norm.

What accounts for the difference? It is not the content. The content is the same. It is everything else — the way the teacher holds space, the quality of presence they bring, how they read the energy of the room, when they pause and when they press forward, how they handle a question that challenges their framework, whether they teach from memory or from understanding.

A teacher who has truly understood what they are teaching teaches differently from one who has merely memorised it. The first teacher can approach the same idea from twelve different angles depending on which student is asking and what that student needs. The second can only re-explain the same explanation more slowly.

I have delivered the same lecture to two different audiences and received nearly opposite responses. Same words. Different rooms. In one room, the idea landed and ignited something. In the other, it fell flat and aroused suspicion. What changed? Everything that the lecture touched — the collective citta of the audience, the expectations they carried in, the conversations they had before walking into the hall, their readiness, in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, for the adventure being offered.

As I reflected on in You Only See What You Are Ready to See: readiness is the invisible variable that determines almost everything. The teacher cannot fully control it. The communicator cannot fully control it. What both can do is become more sensitive to it — more attuned to the room, to the moment, to the person across the table — and respond accordingly.

The Circle Within Which We Judge

In my earlier piece, Circle of Possibilities: How We Evaluate Ideas, I described the mental framework through which each person assesses what is possible. This circle is not fixed. It is shaped by personality, saṃskāras, value systems, professional conditioning, and the accumulated weight of what has and has not worked in one’s life.

What gets labelled “practical” is, more often than not, simply what lies inside one’s current circle of possibilities. What gets labelled “theoretical” — or “not workable” or “too idealistic” — is what lies outside it.

The word “practical” is one of the most effective ways we have of foreclosing inquiry. It sounds grounded. It sounds wise. It sounds like the voice of experience. And sometimes it is. But often it is simply the voice of the closed citta, which has decided that it already knows, and would rather not go through the trouble of examining that assumption.

Research on decision-making describes a hierarchy that most people follow, usually without knowing it: they first reach for their own personal experience, then for the experiences of people they know and trust, and only reluctantly for the knowledge of strangers and experts. There is wisdom in this ordering — personal experience is immediate and directly relevant. But the same research identifies a persistent problem: when personal experience is thin, outdated, or drawn from genuinely different conditions, people continue to weight it more heavily than they should, and systematically discount the knowledge of those who have actually navigated the territory being considered.

There is even a name for this tendency: egocentric advice discounting. The more someone feels confident in their own prior experience, the less weight they give to external input — even when that input comes from sources better positioned to know. The ahaṃkāra, protecting its own edifice of understanding, quietly demotes whatever challenges it.

The entrepreneur who has built a massive corporation calls something impractical through the lens of frameworks she has been trained in. The academic calls it impractical because there is no established literature to support it. The doctor calls it impractical because it does not fit the clinical protocols she follows. Each of them is, in a sense, correct — within their circle. The question is whether their circle is the right frame for this particular question.

The Diversity That Makes Understanding Possible

Here is something I have found deeply generative in collaborative work: the very diversity of mental models and circles of possibility, which seems like an obstacle to agreement, is actually the condition for a richer understanding.

In Collaboration, Consciousness and Diversity, I explored how Nature itself depends on diversity — the forest does not grow from a single species of tree. The intelligence of an ecosystem lies in the multiplicity of its elements and the relationships between them. The same is true of a team, a learning community, an inquiry circle.

When I sit across someone who has tried the tea and found it wanting, and I listen carefully to exactly what he tried, how he tried it, what happened, what did not — I am not just gathering data about his experience. I am expanding my own understanding of the variable space within which the tea operates. His failure is not evidence that the tea does not work. It is evidence that it did not work in those specific conditions, with those specific variables, in that specific person’s constitution and context. And that information, properly received, is valuable.

This is what Collaboration for Truth means in practice. Not the agreement of minds that see the same thing, but the patient assembly of partial perspectives into something closer to the whole. As the Ṛgveda puts it — Ekaṃ Sat, Viprāhā Bahudhā Vadanti — truth is one, but the wise speak of it in many ways. The many ways are not a problem to be resolved. They are the very texture of honest inquiry.

Cycleback makes a related point from his study of logic across cultures. Western classical logic, with its emphasis on rigid either/or dichotomies, is one tradition of reasoning. Daoist and Buddhist thought, by contrast, have long embraced contradiction and fluidity as inherent features of reality rather than problems to be eliminated. The Indian darśana tradition is rich with this same recognition — that different frameworks illuminate different facets of the same reality, and that the insistence on a single framework always costs you something. The tradition of tarka and vitarka, of structured debate and counter-argument, was not designed to produce a winner. It was designed to produce a fuller picture.

What, Then, Is Theory?

I want to offer a small but important reframe. Theory is not the opposite of practice. Theory is practice that has not yet found its hands.

Every skilled practitioner was once a theorist. Every master chef once read a recipe and found it wanting. Every great teacher once sat through lectures that left them cold and wondered how to do it differently. The gap between theory and practice is not a permanent condition. It is a stage — one that closes through sustained, reflective engagement with the material.

The trap is not theory. The trap is the certainty that what one has already practised is the whole of what is possible. The trap is the mind that has converted its experience into a verdict rather than a question.

I am reminded of Maharshi Patañjali’s description of avidyā — the deepest ignorance is not the absence of information but the confusion between what is transient and what is real, between the map and the territory, between the recipe and the dish. We mistake our mental models for reality itself, and in doing so, we stop learning.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, applied not to mathematics but to the mind, suggest something similar: no matter how much we have experienced, no matter how refined our logical framework, there will always be truths we cannot reach from within our current system. Not because those truths are inaccessible in principle, but because the system we are using to reach them has built-in limits. Growth requires stepping outside the system. It requires, occasionally, the willingness to be wrong about what we think we know.

The art of thinking clearly — as I explored in that article — begins with the recognition that every label we assign, every category we use, every box into which we place an experience, is a tool of convenience, not a statement of final truth. The eggplant does not know it is supposed to behave according to the recipe. The student does not know they are supposed to respond to the lecture in the way the previous audience did. The situation does not know that you have already decided how it ends.

Toward a More Humble Epistemology

What would it look like to approach a meeting, a proposal, a strange new idea — or a cup of medicinal tea — with what the Zen tradition calls shoshin, beginner’s mind?

It would look like slowing the internal tribunal down. It would look like becoming curious about the variable space — all the ways this thing might be different from what you encountered before. It would look like asking the person across the table not just whether something works, but exactly how they experienced it not working, and what that tells both of you about the conditions required for it to work.

It would look like recognising that your circle of possibilities is real, but not final. And that the person across the table from you — the one whose logic has been trained by a completely different set of experiences — carries a perspective that, if you are willing to receive it, could expand that circle in ways your own experience never could.

The IIT Jodhpur research describes a cascade of strategies that people use when navigating unfamiliar decisions: filtering information analogically, seeking social proof, adapting expectations as more is learned, and regulating their emotional responses to stay open rather than reactive. What is striking is that these strategies are not exotic or difficult. They are simply habits of epistemic humility — the practice of holding your prior conclusions a little more lightly, and your incoming evidence a little more generously.

The mind that knows it has a citta full of assumptions is already freer than the mind that does not. Seeing the illusion is the beginning of intelligence. The cook who knows that her recipe is an approximation of the dish, not the dish itself, will cook it with more attention, more responsiveness, more willingness to adjust in the moment. The teacher who knows that the lecture she delivered brilliantly last year may not land the same way this year — because the audience is different, the moment is different, and she herself is different — will walk into the room more awake.

And perhaps that is where the real knowledge lives — not in the recipe, not in the lecture notes, not in the verdict stored in the citta, but in the quality of attention we bring to this moment, this person, this cup of tea.

If this resonated, you might also enjoy: Circle of Possibilities: How We Evaluate Ideas | You Only See What You Are Ready to See | A Note on Mental Models and Perception | Collaboration for Truth | Cutting Through the Misty Veil of Māyā

The post The Recipe Is Not the Dish first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

There is a question I return to often — whether I am sitting across from a founder at the edge of their first real venture, or watching a well-funded organisation spin its wheels despite every structural advantage. The question is deceptively simple.

What is the problem you are actually trying to solve?

Not the solution you want to offer. The problem. The gap that exists whether or not you show up to fill it.

This distinction — between problem and solution — is where most enterprises, dharmic or otherwise, begin to come apart at the seam. We fall in love with what we want to do, what we have trained to do, what feels noble and important. And then, quietly, almost unconsciously, we begin building a story around it. We construct the problem to fit the answer we have already decided upon. This can be called reverse marketing. In plain language, it is the beginning of a very expensive self-deception.

The Right Starting Point: Problem Before Product

There is a principle from systems engineering that applies as much to a dharmic enterprise as it does to aerospace: a well-defined problem is fifty percent of the solution. The moment you clearly articulate what is broken, missing, or unaddressed — and do so with intellectual honesty rather than commercial convenience — the solution begins to take shape on its own.

The customer, as the saying goes, does not come to the hardware store wanting a half-inch drill bit. They come wanting a half-inch hole. That hole can be made in a dozen ways. If you assume the customer already knows the right tool, you will spend your life selling drill bits to people who might have been better served by something entirely different.

So, the first discipline is this: go up before you go across. Move higher in the problem space before you descend into solution development. Identify the unaddressed need — not the one that conveniently fits your offering, but the one that genuinely exists and has not been answered. That honesty will lead you somewhere real.

The Dharmic Test: Easy, Effortless, Enjoyable

Once you have honestly identified the problem, the next question is equally important: why are you the one to solve it?

Here is a test I have used for years, drawn not from any MBA framework but from something far older and more precise. Ask yourself whether what you are proposing to do passes three conditions simultaneously — Is it easy? Is it effortless? Is it enjoyable?

I do not mean easy in the sense of requiring no skill. I mean easy in the sense that no one has to teach you how to begin. When the camera turns on, do you need to prepare — or does what needs to be said simply arrive? When an unexpected stage appears, do you scramble — or do you discover that your entire life up to that moment has been the preparation?

I once walked into a situation where someone handed me a microphone and said, essentially, “go.” There was no script, no teleprompter, no advance notice. What came through was not something I had assembled the night before. It was the distillation of decades of living inside these questions. That is what effortlessness actually looks like — not the absence of depth, but such depth that the doing becomes natural.

This is, in its essence, what the tradition calls svadharma. Your dharma is not an aspiration you work toward — it is a recognition of what is already operating through you. The work is simply to see it clearly.

If you find yourself on a steep learning curve at the moment of execution, the cost is not just financial. It is credibility, energy, and the opportunity cost of the thing you could have done where you were already prepared. Do not enter a venture in order to learn. Learn first. Then enter. And when you do, the doing should feel like finally being asked to do what you were already doing anyway.

Knowing Who You Are Actually Serving

One of the most persistent errors in mission-driven work is ambiguity about the actual customer. We say “we serve everyone” and thereby serve no one with any real distinction.

In the context of education, the question is worth sitting with carefully. Are you serving the student, the teacher, or the institution? These are not the same. Serve the wrong audience with the right content and you create expectation without fulfilment — and that particular downward spiral, once it begins, is difficult to reverse.

The moment you have genuine clarity about who is on the other end of your offering, the design of everything changes. The language changes. The pricing changes. The distribution changes. The whole product — not just your piece of it, but the full ecosystem required for someone to actually benefit — becomes visible.

Think of it this way. If you introduce a new kind of toothpaste into the world, someone else must already be providing the toothbrush. The whole product has to exist for your piece of it to function. This means knowing not only what you are offering, but what else needs to be in place — what is already in place — and where the gaps still remain.

On Building Teams: Hire for Who They Already Are

This principle extends to team building in ways that have cost me significantly when I have ignored it.

I have made the mistake of hiring people I liked and believing I could train them into what the role required. Each time, the project paid the price. At the moment of hiring, the person should already be able to do something exceptionally well. We can add to that. We can deepen it, expand it, orient it toward a shared purpose. But we cannot begin from a blank slate and fill it during the work itself. That is running a school, not an enterprise.

The Danger of Flattering Yourself

There is a particular hazard I have watched it quietly claim otherwise sincere efforts. It is the temptation toward grandiose self-description.

“He has transformed millions of lives.” “She is the foremost voice of our generation.” These lines are written into introductions and marketing materials as though the scale of the claim creates the scale of the impact. It does not. In fact, it often does the opposite — it creates a gap between the expectation and the experience that erodes trust over time.

Permission to teach comes from within, confirmed by the lineage, and expressed through the natural arising of opportunity. The moment I begin to hallucinate about my virtues I have already compromised the very thing that made the offering worth anything.

Marketing, understood correctly, is the creation of the product itself. What we usually call marketing — the promotion, the advertising, the titles and thumbnails — is downstream of that. If the product is real, the rest follows: slowly, steadily, through word of mouth and deep attention to the few rather than shallow attention to the many.

Ātma-Avalokanam: The Practice That Makes All of This Possible

Everything described above rests on a single foundation — the capacity to see yourself clearly.

Metacognition, the ability to observe your own thinking, your motivations, your blind spots in real time, is not a modern discovery. It is what our tradition has always called Ātma-Avalokanam: self-contemplation, the ongoing act of turning awareness back upon itself. Without it, every strategy is guesswork dressed up as planning.

This is not the same as self-criticism or self-doubt. It is the quiet, rigorous practice of asking: Am I being truthful here? Is this decision coming from clarity or from the fear of missing out? Am I raising my hand for this task because I am ready for it, or because I want to appear ready? This does not make you perfect – it only helps you recognize and see that you are not perfect. Seeing the illusion is the beginning of intelligence as JK once said.

The highest expression of this practice produces what the tradition calls sākṣī-bhāva — the witness stance. Not detachment in the cold sense, but a kind of steady, undefended awareness of what is actually happening inside you and around you. From that place, decisions arise not from urgency or ego but from alignment. And alignment, sustained over time, is the only thing that actually builds something worth keeping.

I notice that the Shadripus are always active and wanting to dominate me and to keep them at bay I always must be very alert. Aatmavalokana helps me see them working and helps me disarm them before they cause irreparable damage. Being honest with yourself is the first step. If you say the Shadripus are not a problem for me then you bave a problem!

Adrushta: The Grace That Cannot Be Manufactured

There is something I have noticed across the years of this work that I cannot fully account for through any framework, dharmic or otherwise. It keeps showing up.

In Sanskrit, there is no word for luck. What we have instead is adrushta — literally, “the unseen.” Something you did at time one appears as consequence at time forty. The cause and effect are both real, the karmic thread connecting them is real, but the arrival of the fruit carries a quality that can only be described as grace. You did not manufacture it. You cannot claim it entirely as your own achievement.

I have had people walk into rooms and ask me to speak without prior notice. What came through was not something assembled in the moment. I have had opportunities arrive through what I can only describe as a prior intention — a thought, a willingness to contribute, and then the call. I am not being mystical for effect. I am reporting what I have observed, consistently, over a long period of time.

This does not make planning irrelevant. It makes the quality of your inner preparation more important than any outer strategy. When opportunity arrives, it is not asking whether you have a deck ready. It is asking whether your whole life up to that point has been a preparation for this moment.

The question to hold, always, is this: Am I preparing in the right way? Not for a specific outcome, but for a certain quality of readiness — the kind where, when the moment arrives, there is no gap between who I am and what is needed.

Start Where You Are Already Standing

If there is a single thread running through everything above, it is this: begin with what is already true about you, not with what you hope to become.

Know the problem before you design the solution. Know your audience before you define your offering. Know your team’s actual strengths before you assign responsibilities. Know your own motivations before you claim any public mission.

And above all, apply the effortless test — not as a counsel of passivity, but as a compass of alignment. If what you are doing does not feel, in some essential way, like the most natural thing you could be doing with your life right now, the work ahead will cost more than it needs to. Not merely in money, but in the quality of what gets produced and the wellbeing of everyone it touches.

A ship that leaves port ten degrees off course is fully off course after a hundred miles. There is no recovering from that with speed or effort alone. But a ship that leaves from the right place, in the right direction, under its own natural momentum — that one needs very little correction along the way.

Start there.

The post Before You Build first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

Preservation is the easy part. The real task is learning to ask the right questions of our own inheritance.

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Pragya Research Scholar, Central University of Gujarat Rating: 5/5

“One of the best sessions till date. The dimensions it opened up. The mindset shift that happened today which made me take the road of going deeper into what sort of research are we doing. Today’s session made me question and also, to dig deeper into becoming someone who asks the right kind of questions. Thank you to the organizing team. Gratitude.”

Hardi Master Research Scholar, University of Mumbai Rating: 5/5

“The case studies provided by Kulkarni sir gave an in-depth understanding of the need to preserve. I request Avnish sir if possible to conduct such lecture by Kulkarni sir once again. His insights are truly knowledgeable.”

Karuna Kumari Ram Research Scholar, Sido Kanhu Murmu University Rating: 5/5

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“Nice explanation with good illustrations. Sir elaborated on how one can understand digitization in this modern era and how one can use that for research. Thank you.”

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Dr. M.S. Priyadarshini Associate Professor, CHRIST University Rating: 5/5

“Really very interesting inputs on dissemination.”

Dr. Antra Gupta Assistant Professor, Markham College of Commerce, Hazaribagh Rating: 5/5

“Interesting and insightful.”

ACTION REQUESTS (worth following up on)

Dr. Deepakkumar S Assistant Professor, Christ University Rating: 5/5

“Enriching session, I need to reach out to him, so it will be good if you can share their contact information.”

Sonali Khade Assistant Professor, Ghanshyamdas Saraf College of Arts & Commerce Rating: 5/5

“Please share PPT because it has excellent reference content.”

Dr. Muthulakshmi R Independent Researcher Rating: 5/5

“Conduct more sessions like this.”

Dr. Suresha R Assistant Professor, Central Sanskrit University Rating: 3/5

“Please share the online resources and PPT.”

BRIEF AFFIRMATIONS

Sohini Bhattacharyya Psychological Counselor & Music Therapist, Pradip Centre for Autism Management Rating: 5/5 “Excellent session”

HARIHARAN R Guest Lecturer, Government Law College, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu Rating: 5/5 “Excellent Session”

Dr. Sriparna Chatterjee Assistant Professor, Matiabuj College, Kolkata Rating: 5/5 “Excellent observation”

Prasanna Byahatti Assistant Professor, JAIN University Rating: 5/5 “Best session”

Srikrishna Bhaskar Rao Assistant Professor, Jain University, Global Campus Rating: 5/5 “Very interesting and informative session”

Latha M Librarian, JAIN (Deemed-to-be University) Rating: 5/5 “Very informative session”

Ms Karishma Vincent Assistant Professor, Women’s Christian College Rating: 5/5 “Very informative”

Srijita Barui PG Student, Netaji Subhas Open University Rating: 5/5 “Today’s session was very interesting.”

Dr. Sahana Florence P Assistant Professor, B.M.S. College of Law Rating: 5/5 “Session was very informative.”

SOWJAJYA S K Research Scholar, Jain Deemed to be University Rating: 5/5 “Very informative.”

Dhiyaneshwari R.P Assistant Professor, SAHS JAIN Rating: 4/5 “Very thoughtful session”

Dr. Nirmala Khess Assistant Professor, K.B. Women’s College Hazaribagh VBU Rating: 5/5 “Good session”

Srimanti Sarkar Assistant Professor, West Bengal State University Rating: 5/5 “Very good”

When I was aksed by JAIN University to teach a session for their Faculty Development Programme on Digital Tools for the Documentation, Preservation, and Dissemination of Indian Knowledge Systems, I assumed the talk would be a routine survey — a tour of portals, an inventory of apps, a look at the major government missions, and the usual closing exhortation to use them. Preparing for it turned out to be something else. Examined honestly, the topic is not a technical brief. It is a civilizational question wearing the costume of a digital one. And the technical answers, important as they are, are not where the real work lies.

When I asked the participants at the start what came to mind on hearing the topic, the responses arrived in a pattern I have heard before. Manuscripts must be preserved. Palm leaves are decaying. Apps and platforms must be built. Information must be made accessible. Pedagogy needs new tools. Each of these is true, and each of them, taken alone, is incomplete. Underneath every one of those statements sits an unspoken assumption about what Indian Knowledge Systems are and what preservation means — an assumption inherited largely intact from a colonial framing that still operates as our default. If we do not surface and examine that assumption, all the digitisation in the world will leave us standing exactly where we are.

This article is my attempt to set out, in the order they unfolded for me as I prepared the talk, the questions I think we have to ask before we ask which tool to use.

Part One — The Real Stakes

1. The Storm Has Passed. Now What?

In the seventy-nine years since the colonisers left, we have been doing something simpler than we admit. We have been sheltering. The storm came, swept through, and a great deal of what we were — texts, sculptures, manuscripts, traditions, lineages, institutional memory — was either physically carried away, written out of the official narrative, or quietly allowed to lapse for want of paramparā. We took shelter wherever we could find it. We learned to live inside the categories given to us. We told the story of who we were in the vocabulary of who told that story to us.

The storm, now, has mostly passed — though I am not sure it has entirely passed. We are stepping out, looking around, and asking the obvious question: ab kyā bachā hai? What is left? What can we rebuild from?

That is a different question from “what should we digitise?” — and it has to be asked first.

There is a line I find myself returning to often. Until the lion is able to tell its own story, the story of the hunt will always belong to the hunter. For seventy-nine years the story of India has been told, ingested, and lived almost entirely through narratives spun by a colonial hand — narratives the West continues to spin with subtler tools and broader reach. Every inscription we recover, every copper plate we read, every vīragallu (hero stone) we identify in a forgotten village edge, every manuscript we transcribe — these are not just artefacts. They are the materials with which Bhārata learns, slowly, to tell its own story on its own terms.

That is what the digital question is actually about. Not pixels and PDFs. Sovereignty.

2. The Sone kī Chiḍiyā Problem: Loss by Abundance

For a long stretch of our history we were sone kī chiḍiyā — the golden bird. The result of that abundance is now our problem.

Walk into a vast warehouse store with a million SKUs across forty departments and three floors. Stand in the middle of it. Now try to find one specific bolt of cloth on a particular shelf. You cannot. Things are not lost in the sense of being absent. They are lost in the sense of being buried under the accumulated weight of other things. That, more than any single act of plunder, is the deeper problem with the IKS inheritance. We did not lose because we had little. We lost because we had so much that the inventory finally got the better of us, and then a colonial fire passed through the warehouse.

The implication for documentation is direct. We are not preserving in the way the Greeks needed to preserve. They had a finite, well-mapped canon, much of it already lost, and what remained could be catalogued by a single generation of scholars. We have ten million manuscripts at the lowest estimate — and that is only the written record. Whole śākhās of the Vedas have already gone silent because the last bearer of an oral lineage passed without a successor. Whole village dance forms have disappeared in a generation. A family in Kerala that for centuries cast bronze mirrors using a method known nowhere else — one family, last man, his daughter learned just in time. That is the pattern.

So when someone says, in good faith, we should digitise the manuscripts, the answer is yes, and also: that is the easy part. The harder part is knowing what else counts as the inheritance, and getting to it before the last bearer takes it with him.

3. What Vidyā Means — and What Knowledge Is Not

There is a translation problem at the centre of all this that no portal will fix.

The English word knowledge and the Sanskrit word vidyā are not synonyms. Vidyā is what the Indic tradition has always set apart as the form of learning that leads to mukti— the inquiry that ends in freedom. Sā vidyā yā vimuktaye, say our texts. Everything else — śilpa-naipuṇam, useful skill, transmissible craft, applied knowledge of the material order — is something different. Useful, necessary, even venerable. But not what the ṛṣis meant when they spoke of jñāna.

We have so much written text — more, by any measure, than any other civilization — and yet the tradition is explicit: the Veda itself does not deliver the knowledge by being read. Knowledge, in the Indic frame, is anubhava. It is experienced, embodied, transmitted through a living guru who walks the śiṣya to an insight that no manuscript can hold. The Western frame, by contrast, treats knowledge as information — quantifiable, storable, transmissible by text. When we set up our digitisation projects on the Western frame and call them IKS preservation, we have already mis-specified the problem.

This is not an argument against digitisation. It is an argument for honesty about what digitisation can and cannot carry. The śāstras it can preserve. The paramparā that turns the śāstra into jñāna — that we have to preserve differently, and we cannot afford to confuse the two.

4. The Many Forms IKS Actually Inhabits

If you ask the average academic where Indian knowledge lives, you will get two answers: oral and written. This is the colonial inventory. It is wrong by orders of magnitude.

Indian knowledge lives — and has always lived — in at least these forms. In palm leaves and copper plates, yes. In inscriptions on the walls of nine-hundred-year-old functional temples standing today in the middle of growing cities. In carvings inside caves that no one has properly read for fifteen centuries. In vīragallu — hero stones — that researchers I know personally have found at village dump-sites and dilapidated temple edges across Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, each carrying a half-millennium-old story nobody asked to hear.

It lives in the architecture of a single Hoysaḷa temple, which holds enough metallurgical, geometric, iconographic, theological and acoustic knowledge to occupy a serious researcher for a lifetime. In the bhāva of a Kathak performance. In the silence of the sthapati who can still raise a stone pillar to the spec of the original āgamas — except that the last sthapatis are retiring and there is no institutional route to becoming one. In the lullaby my grandmother knew at ninety-five — perhaps two hundred of them — that died with her because we did not think to record. In the stitched fabric of a kanthā embroidery from Bengal, where the women have been encoding agricultural and ritual instructions into pattern for so long that they no longer call it knowledge.

The day we sit down to seriously plan IKS preservation, the first task is not to fund another portal. It is to make an honest catalogue of the forms in which our inheritance presently exists — and to be honest that most of them have no portal yet, because we have not yet conceded that they count.

Part Two — From Preservation to Inquiry

5. The Real Greenfield: AI, Integrated Databases, and the Quality of Our Questions

I want to come now to what I think is the actual opportunity in front of us — and one that, in my reading, almost no one is naming clearly.

Set aside, for a moment, the question of which app to use. Imagine, instead, the state of affairs five or ten years from now, after the Jñāna-Bhāratam mission and its successors have done their work. Imagine that every manuscript known to us has been digitised. That every inscription, every copper plate, every vīragallu has been catalogued and tagged. That the islanded databases — currently scattered across IGNCA, ASI, NMM, the regional manuscript missions, the university repositories, the Pondicherry institutes — have been stitched into a single integrated whole. And that this integrated corpus has been connected to a generation of AI systems capable of searching, cross-referencing, translating and reasoning over it.

What does that change?

It changes the bottleneck. For a thousand years the bottleneck in Indic research has been access. A scholar in Karnataka who wanted to verify a claim against a Maithili manuscript in Bihar had to undertake a journey that could itself be the subject of a three-hour film. Most never went. Most research was done within whatever the scholar’s own institution had on its shelves, with whatever interpretive lineage that institution carried. Once the bottleneck of access is removed, a new bottleneck appears — and this is the one I want to flag.

The new bottleneck is the quality of the questions we are equipped to ask.

When the Kurukṣetra timeline can be cross-referenced in seconds against southern dynastic chronologies, against agricultural patterns, against textile records, against ritual calendars and astronomical configurations — the limit on what we can know about ourselves shifts from “what data exists” to “who can frame the inquiry well enough to make the data speak.” When a contested Manusmṛti verse can be triangulated against its actual deployment in regional jurisprudence, against the political circumstances of the period, against parallel injunctions in the Dharmasūtras, and against the social structures of the specific deśa-kāla-paristhiti in which it was applied — the question is no longer whether one can find the verse, but whether one can ask the question that lets the verse and its silence both speak.

This is the real greenfield. The integrated database is the easy part. The civilizational task is to produce a generation of researchers — collaborating, networked, multi-disciplinary, methodologically rigorous, paramparā-grounded — who know how to interrogate it.

We do not, at present, have that generation. We barely have a discipline for producing it.

6. The Missing Discipline

We are about to hand a vast, integrated database and a battery of AI tools to a research community that was trained, almost without exception, in nineteenth-century European silos — history over here, chemistry over there, Sanskrit literature down the corridor, archaeology somewhere in the basement, engineering in a separate building entirely. The categories themselves were drawn for the convenience of a different civilization. We then inherited the categories, built our universities around them, and now wonder why our researchers cannot see the obvious connections.

The Mādhava school of mathematics flourished in fourteenth-century Kerala. It produced infinite series for trigonometric functions that European mathematics did not reach for another three hundred years. The standard question asked about it is: how did this happen? The far more interesting question — never asked, because the silo prevents the question — is: what was simultaneously happening in temple construction, in astronomical observation, in ritual calendar reform, in maritime navigation, in trade with the Arab and Chinese networks, in the patronage politics of the Zamorin, that made Mādhava’s school not an isolated genius but the visible peak of a much larger civilizational pattern? The data exists to answer that question. The discipline to ask it does not.

If there is a Vice-Chancellor or Dean reading this, I would put the proposition to them plainly. We need a new kind of programme — call it Integrative IKS Research, or whatever name will survive committee — whose explicit task is to train researchers in multi-dimensional inquiry. Researchers who can walk into a thousand-year-old temple and read it simultaneously as historian, metallurgist, iconographer, acoustician, psychologist, sociologist, structural engineer, and śraddhā-vidyā student of the paramparā that built it. Researchers who can hold all of those readings together and ask the question that no single discipline could have framed.

That programme does not exist. The market for its graduates already does.

7. The Temple as Living Laboratory

Take any thousand-year-old temple within a hundred kilometres of where you live. Most academic visits to it look the same. The historian shows up with the history students, takes them around the walls, points at the inscriptions, narrates the dynasty, leaves. The architecture department, separately, brings its own students for a different kind of tour. The Sanskrit faculty, when it visits at all, attends the darśana and goes home. The temple, meanwhile, contains all of those layers at once. It is the integration that is the knowledge.

I want to propose something every Indian university could try within a year.

Take one such temple. Send to it, on the same day, an interdisciplinary group — history professors and students, architecture professors and students, Sanskrit faculty, art-historians, iconographers, metallurgists, structural engineers, acousticians, psychology researchers, Āyurveda faculty. Add the temple’s traditional priest. Add a śilpa-śāstra paṇḍit if you can find one. Add a few well-known IKS commentators — the kind who confidently claim from a podium that the dhvajastambha is the svādhiṣṭhāna cakra, the garbhagṛha is the sahasrāra — and ask them to defend their claims in front of all the others. Now spend a day there. Not as a tour. As an investigation. Have each discipline read the same temple in its own register. Have the priest and the paṇḍit explain what the paramparā says. Let modern scholars test the paramparā claims with their instruments. Document every reading. Cross-reference them.

What you have produced in one day is not a temple visit. It is a living laboratory of the Indian knowledge system. Repeated across the country, across temples, across years, it would generate a corpus of integrated research that no Western department can match — because no Western department has temples like ours to read.

Add children to the same exercise. Not as decoration. As participants. Add their parents. Now the temple is also doing what it was always meant to do, which is to teach the samāj about itself.

This summer I ran a children’s camp in Bengaluru and took the children to the Omkāreśvara Hills temple complex. The site has a Saptarṣi Mandir, a Daśāvatāra sequence on the outer wall, a Matsya-Nārāyaṇa shrine, vigrahas of Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, Madhvācārya, Rāmānujācārya, the Guru Granth Sāhib, and a Dvādaśa Jyotirliṅga installation in which each jyotirliṅga is consecrated with its yantra. None of these children — bright, curious, urban — had heard the words Saptarṣi, Tryācārya, or Jyotirliṅga before that morning. By the time we returned, they were demanding I tell them the stories of each. The jijñāsā had been awakened in three hours, on site, by a temple that had been sitting fifteen kilometres from their school all along. We did not need new pedagogy. We needed to use the pedagogy that was already cut into the stone.

8. The Disappearing Vaidya

While we plan preservation, a quieter loss is happening in parallel — and Āyurveda offers the clearest current example of it.

I recently spoke at length with a number of Āyurveda students currently in BAMS and post-graduate programmes across India. Three things came up in nearly every conversation. Tantrayukti has been quietly dropped from much of the curriculum. The aṣṭāṅga framework is being taught as a list to be memorised rather than as a clinical method to be lived. And the pharmaceuticalisation of Āyurveda — patentable molecules extracted from the dravyaguṇa corpus and sold as branded products — is steadily replacing the practice of a traditional vaidya who knew which deśa-kāla-prakṛti configuration called for which anupāna in which patient on which day.

There is, in parallel, a documentary I would recommend to anyone teaching IKS — a day-in-the-life of a traditional vaidya in Kerala who began learning Āyurveda on his father’s lap at the age of four. By twenty he could recognise hundreds of herbs in the forest, knew their rasa and vīrya at different seasons, knew when each had to be plucked and how. That vaidya exists. So do his colleagues. We have not, as a country, asked the obvious question: how many of them are still practising, where, and how do we make sure their accumulated clinical knowledge is captured in a form that does not collapse into a pharmaceutical patent application?

This is what I mean when I say documentation is the easy part. We can scan the Suśruta Saṃhitā in a week. We are about to lose the people who know what it means.

Part Three — Documentation, Dissemination, and Dhārmic Pedagogy

9. Stitching the Civilizational Story

When the digitised corpus eventually comes online and the questions begin to be asked at scale, one of the first things that will become visible is something we have stopped seeing in the colonial frame: Bhārata was never stitched together by political union. It was stitched together by a shared knowledge system, a shared philosophical vocabulary, and a shared aesthetic.

Sanjeev Sanyal has pointed out, and the Karṇāṭa and Sena dynastic histories confirm, that kings from what is now Karnataka travelled to Bihar and ruled the Maithili-speaking regions for more than two hundred years — without imposing their own language. Instead they patronised and developed the local language. The Sena dynasty, plausibly from the Mysore region, ruled Bengal for over a century, took the Mahiṣāsuramardinī form of Durgā with them, and laid the foundations of what we now call Bengali high culture. R. C. Majumdar wrote about this. It is not obscure. It is simply not in the syllabus.

What does this mean for the average modern Indian student? It means the colonial narrative — of India was always fragmented, Britain unified it — is empirically wrong, and we can now demonstrate it from primary sources. It means the Hindi-versus-Tamil fight, the North-versus-South fight, the endless three-language-formula politics — all of it rests on a fragmented reading of a civilization that was, at the level that actually mattered, deeply integrated for a very long time.

Once the database is queryable, this kind of story will be recoverable not in fragments but in pattern. The story of who we were will, finally, be tellable in our own voice.

10. Storytelling as Strategic Capability

I had a conversation recently with an established IKS author who told me, with weary honesty, that most of the new IKS scholarship being produced — well-researched, primary-source-grounded, rigorously footnoted — is, to put it plainly, unreadable. The books are correct. They are also boring. They will reach a few hundred specialists and stop there.

This is, in my reading, a fatal weakness of the current revival, and one we have to take seriously.

Storytelling is not entertainment. The minute you think of it as entertainment, you have already abandoned the field to whoever does the storytelling instead. The minute you think of entertainment as frivolous, you have lost the battle for the public mind. The Alaṅkāra Śāstra — the classical Indian science of aesthetic effect — was developed by people who understood, with a precision the modern academy has lost, that the way a thing is said determines whether it lands. The Līlāvatī taught algebra in poetry. The Bṛhadīśvara taught metaphysics in stone. The Rāmāyaṇa taught the entire puruṣārtha framework through narrative. None of these confused beauty with frivolity. They knew that beauty is the carrier wave on which meaning travels.

If we want IKS scholarship to actually reach the samāj — which, I would argue, is the only reason to do it — then documentary filmmaking, long-form journalism, narrative non-fiction, illustrated children’s books, animation, well-told podcasts, and yes, even short-form video, must be accepted as legitimate forms of academic output. Alaṅkāra must be part of the IKS researcher’s training, not a separate ornamental subject. The lion that is now learning to tell its own story has to also learn to tell it well.

11. The Gurukula–University Bridge

The risk of the coming digital integration is a digital divide — the well-funded universities will get access to the integrated databases and AI tools first, while the gurukulas, which actually hold the unbroken paramparā that gives those databases their meaning, will be left without the infrastructure to use them.

This is precisely backwards. The gurukula is where the interpretive lineage lives. The university is where the analytic apparatus lives. Neither is complete on its own. The serious civilizational move is to bridge them — to set up R&D centres inside gurukulas, to bring gurukula ācāryas onto university committees with full standing, to fund cross-appointments, to design research programmes in which the paramparā-question and the śāstra-question and the AI-question are addressed in the same room.

If any gurukula reading this is interested in setting up an R&D centre in collaboration with a willing university partner, I am happy to help broker the conversation. The seed of this is not large. The funding required is modest by university standards. The output, done well, would be among the most consequential research India produces in the coming decade.

12. A Cultural Map for Every City

Most Indian cities have, within their municipal boundaries, an embarrassment of IKS riches that almost no resident has properly visited.

In Bengaluru, where I live, there is the Bangalore Museum — whose holdings of broken sculptures, temple columns, inscriptions and ritual objects would take a serious student years to digest. There is the building, completed in recent years by one of the original publishers of Amar Chitra Katha, in which every floor is carved end-to-end by sculptors brought in from across the country — one floor Vaikuṇṭha, one floor Kailāsa, every story from the relevant Purāṇa sculpted in stone. Hardly anyone in the city knows it exists. There is the Omkāreśvara complex I mentioned. There is the nine-hundred-year-old functional temple half a kilometre from my office. Multiply this by every major Indian city. The inventory is staggering.

A cultural map of every city — well-curated, professionally produced, integrated into school curricula, available on a phone — would be one of the highest-leverage dissemination projects we could undertake. It would also force a quiet shift in pedagogy. Pratyakṣa — direct perception — was always considered the most reliable pramāṇa in our system, and anubhava the deepest mode of knowing. The current education system, which keeps a child in an air-conditioned classroom looking at a photograph of a temple that is, in fact, fifteen minutes away by metro, has the relationship between knowledge and experience exactly inverted. The temple is the textbook. The textbook should be the supplement.

13. From Documentation to Darśana

I want to close by returning to the question I asked at the start of the JAIN University session: what is this all for?

If we treat the IKS digitisation project as a technical exercise — manuscripts in, PDFs out, portals built, missions concluded, reports filed — we will produce, in twenty years, a magnificently catalogued archive of a civilization that no longer knows how to read itself. The catalogue will then be read, as so much else has been, by scholars trained elsewhere, with frameworks built elsewhere, for purposes set elsewhere. We will have preserved the body and lost the breath.

If, instead, we treat the project for what it actually is — a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-acquire primary custody of our own civilizational inheritance, to train a generation of researchers capable of interrogating it, to bridge the paramparā and the university, to rebuild the jñāna–śilpa connection that was severed under colonial education, and to tell the story of Bhārata in Bhārata’s own voice — then the digital tools become what they were always meant to be. Sādhana-instruments. Means.

The verbs of this work are six. Find. Reach. Capture. Process. Preserve. Share. They are all necessary. None of them, by themselves, is the point. The point is the seventh verb, the one we keep forgetting to name: understand. And the darśana — the seeing — that arises from understanding.

The IKS project is not a department. It is not a portfolio. It is the next phase of how a civilization that briefly forgot itself is now, slowly, with imperfect tools and the right intent, learning to remember.

If any reader is working in this space — in archives, in gurukulas, in universities, in policy, in technology, in documentary production, in paramparā lineages — I would be glad to hear from you. The work is too large for any one of us. It is exactly the right size for all of us, working as a network.

Vinay Kulkarni

Founder & CEO, ALCHMI Strategy Consulting

Adjunct Professor, RV Institute of Management and IKS Faculty

The post From Documentation to Darśana first appeared on Vinay Kulkarni.

I recently had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion on Vedanta in Education, convened during a festival of Indian thought hosted with Indica. Education is close to my heart. Most of my work and writing circles back to one stubborn question — what does it actually mean to educate a human being, and what can education mean for a civilisation that is trying to remember itself? So when I sat down with three remarkable minds for this conversation, I did not want a seminar. I wanted a churning.

And before the first question, I confessed the mischief in my own framing. We had titled the session Vedanta in Education. But I kept turning it over. Is it Vedanta in education? Or is Vedanta itself education? Hold that question. The whole hour was, in a sense, an answer to it.

Three scholars sat with me, each living proof that the supposed wall between the modern and the perennial is a wall we built, not one we found. Dr. CA Vishwanath P — Chartered Accountant, Company Secretary, an Ācārya in Alaṅkāra Śāstra from the National Sanskrit University at Tirupati, and the force behind the Vyoma Linguistic Labs Foundation. Dr. Ashutosh Simha — a doctorate in geometric control theory from the Indian Institute of Science, postdoctoral years in Estonia and at TU Delft on nonlinear systems and robotics, today a professor of computer science and a senior member of Vedanta Bhāratī. And Dr.Dattatreya Dixit — a traditional Sanskrit scholar, translator and practitioner-educator, gurukula-trained from boyhood, who has run over three hundred and fifty Sanskrit orientation programmes for scholars across the world. To all of them, my namaste, and my gratitude.

Why Does the Human Being Alone Need Education?

Walk through any forest. There is no tiger school. No crocodile school. No academy for eagles. The gazelle knows how to outrun a cheetah within hours of its birth. When the crocodile eggs hatch, the hatchlings know to head for water. Nature equips every creature with precisely what it needs to live the life it was born to live.

So why the human being? Why are we, alone among the species, sent to be taught? Are we not equipped to simply live as nature designed us? I have sat with this question for years, and I do not think it is a small one. It is the question. Because the answer decides what we think a school is for.

Our tradition does not begin with curriculum. It begins with vidyā. And we have a precise sense of the word — sā vidyā yā vimuktaye. That is vidyā which liberates. Not that which informs. Not that which decorates a résumé. That which sets free. Vishwanath ji put it sharply: education is the faculty that lets a human being discriminate — viveka — and discrimination, followed honestly, becomes inquiry, and inquiry walks toward truth. So the only real question a student can ask of any subject is this: does what I am studying take me toward that truth, or does it tie me more tightly to the post?

We also distinguish vidyā from śilpa — the liberating from the useful, the inner from the worldly skill. But here is where India refused the Western habit. We did not make it a binary. We did not ask you to choose the soul or the salary. We held abhyudaya — material flourishing — and niḥśreyasa — the ultimate good — with the same two hands. The panel kept returning to the old distinction of parā and aparā vidyā: even the Vedas and their limbs are counted as the lower knowledge; only that by which the imperishable is known is the higher. Both matter. The sequence between them is everything.

The Cow With Four Legs

I shared a parable I once read from a great saint, and it has never left me. Think of the four puruṣārthas — dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa — as a cow. Try to seize the milk directly, lunge for artha and kāma on their own, and the cow kicks you. But hold the dharma leg and the mokṣa leg, steady her with those, and she gives you nectar.

This is why the order cannot be rearranged. Dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa — in that sequence, not for decoration but as load-bearing structure. Our whole life was once designed around it: brahmacarya, gārhasthya, vānaprastha, sannyāsa, the same logic written across a lifetime.

And here is the wound. After the colonial encounter we inherited an education built on only two of the four legs — an artha–kāma model. Acquisition and consumption. Dharma gone. Mokṣa gone. We sit our children on a two-legged stool and then wonder why they wobble. We have an assembly line that produces clerical output, and we call it school.

Vedanta Means Ānanda

Then Ashutosh ji said something that reorganised the room. Anta does not mean the end of a book. It means where the Vedas converge. And where do they all run and come to rest? In ānanda. Vedanta is ānanda. So in any classroom, learning anything — differential equations, physics, the Veda itself — the first question should be the one almost no one asks while sitting in that classroom: is this going to give me ānanda in some way, or not? That question is missing from our science classes. It is missing, he admitted, from many Vedanta classes too.

Which is why I pushed him. The internet is full of PDFs. Download every Upaniṣad, every commentary Dixit ji could name, onto my laptop tonight — am I now a vedāntin? He smiled and gave the cleanest answer I have heard. Information is jaḍa — inert. Ānanda is the furthest thing from jaḍa; it is the very crest of caitanya, consciousness. You cannot download your way into the living.

And the distinction he drew between knowledge and vidyā I will carry for a long time. Vidyā takes you toward silence. Information takes you toward more entropy, more noise. The old description of the realised one is not the man who has read the most. It is the one who knows the śāstras and yet whose mind is perpetually still, perpetually clean. We venerate the well-read. We have entire libraries of untranslated manuscripts and yet, somehow, we hand the book less authority than the West does. Perhaps because we always knew the book was the boat, not the shore.

No Quarrel Between Science and Vedanta

Is it a contradiction, I asked, to be steeped in geometric control theory and in Vedanta Bhāratī at the same time? Ashutosh ji does not experience one. Science and engineering, his profession, study what is outside — the object. Vedanta turns the attention around, to the subject, to the one who is aware of the object at all. And modern physics, edging toward the place where mind and matter refuse to stay separate, is asking the very question our ṛṣis asked with confidence several thousand years ago: is the observer truly distinct from the observed, or is what we call external reality non-different from the one who perceives it?

He described an experiment in living pedagogy. Under their guru’s guidance, Vedanta Bhāratī took the Dakṣiṇāmūrti Stotram — a text that names no god, prescribes no ritual, and does nothing but analyse our ordinary daily experience to drive home the highest truth — and asked students to replace its classical dṛṣṭāntas with examples from cutting-edge technology. Artificial intelligence. VLSI. Brain-computer interfacing. Held on the palace grounds in Bengaluru, it drew more than five hundred participants, with hackathon booths where Gen Z students — the very ones who would sprint a mile from anything that smelled religious — stood guarding “their” tattva with fierce pride. We remember that Swami Vivekananda carried Vedanta to the West and held his own in conversation with its finest scientific minds. For the Indian mind, there was never a contradiction here. There was only a forgetting.

How Indians Thought About Knowledge

If we want Vedanta in education, we have to talk about epistemology — how Indians actually thought about knowing. Vishwanath ji told a story from a course taught to some of the brightest young minds in the country. The students were made investigators in a corporate scenario: should an established multinational acquire a particular startup? They were handed the ṣaṭ-pramāṇas, the six instruments of valid knowledge.

At the level of pratyakṣa — direct perception — the presentations were brilliant. At upamāna — comparison — the benchmarks against peer companies were excellent. The śabda was all there; the social-media footprint of the target company was impressive. Everything checked out. And then the students went and looked. No servers. No electricity bills. No customer complaints, because there were no customers. A company that existed only on paper. It was anupalabdhi — the pramāṇa of non-apprehension, the knowledge that comes from a meaningful absence — that finally returned the verdict: do not acquire. The rarely-used instrument saved them. That is when these sharp young people wanted to know more. That is how buddhi-jijñāsā works — you do not drag the mind toward this knowledge, you let it discover that the knowledge was already reaching for it.

But brahmavidyā, the panel was clear, is finally experiential. There is the old account of the disciple who comes to the teacher and asks, teach me brahmavidyā. A year of silence. He asks again, and again. The teacher says: the moment I open my mouth and use a śabda, it is no longer Brahman. I can keep telling you that jaggery is sweet. The sweetness will not arrive until you taste it. The text is a ladder — viveka, then vairāgya, then the six-fold wealth, then mumukṣutva, step after step. But the ladder is not the terrace. After the text comes nididhyāsana, and that part no one can do for you.

Sanskrit: The Container and the Content

If Vedanta is the medicine, is Sanskrit the carrier? In Āyurveda, ghṛta is not the cure; it is the anupāna that carries the cure to where it must act. I offered that metaphor and the panel ran with it. Sanskrit, as the great scholars describe it, is the rare thing that is both the container and the content — a bhāṣā and, at once, the jñāna-rāśi held within it.

And the container is not neutral. Chanting Sanskrit ślokas produces the effect of prāṇāyāma — the breath disciplines itself, a bhrāmarī-like resonance sets in. The combination and number of syllables appears to activate more neurons and, crucially, to slow the pruning of synapses — the very thing modern childhood is losing. Memory. Focus. The capacity to hold attention for longer than a swipe. I spent five days at a summer camp this year, watching children closely, and almost every measure you can name — reading comprehension, persistence of hearing, the ability to follow what is spoken, the ability to hold a human conversation — looked bleak. The eight-second mind is not a metaphor anymore. Sanskrit and Vedanta together may be one of the few anupānas we have left for that wound.

The Teacher Is the Whole Curriculum

Here is the part we keep skipping. This is not about content. It is about pedagogy. And people teach the way they were taught. We have an entire army of teachers trained the Western way, and we are about to ask them to teach the Indian way. We should think very honestly about how that is supposed to work.

When a surgeon does a cataract operation, the old clouded lens has to come out before the new one goes in. Put the new lens over the old and you have not restored sight, you have doubled the distortion. The same is true of the mind. We have to decolonise — remove the old lens — before we fit the IKS lens. Otherwise we are layering Indian vocabulary over colonial sight and calling it revival. A śāstri curriculum does not automatically produce śāstra-dṛṣṭi. Going through the syllabus is not the same as acquiring the eye. We are not trying to teach about the five kośas; we are trying to educate through all five, when modern education mostly stops at the annamaya kośa and never goes deeper.

The Bridge Between Teacher and Student

Dixit ji, gurukula-raised, kept returning to a phrase his ācārya gave him: prayoga, parīkṣaṇa, pariṣkāra. Apply it, test it, refine it. And he was firm that the bond is everything. The Upaniṣad is not a distance-education programme. The word itself carries the sense of sitting near — the antevāsin, the one who lives close to the teacher. Make the knowledge practical and the bridge to the student forms almost on its own.

And there is a discipline to that bridge that the modern mind resents. We are told the modern student learns by asking many questions, constantly, immediately. Good — but tell me, I asked them, the food on your plate: do you digest it on the plate, or after it has reached your stomach? You digest it after you have taken it in. So too with a teaching. When you are meant to be doing śravaṇa, and you leap straight into manana and interrogation, the bridge through which transmission happens never gets built — or it breaks before it is finished. The question is not forbidden. It is a matter of when. Knowing which questions are worth your time, and at what stage to ask them, is itself a large part of the pedagogy. The aim, as Dixit ji put it, is to teach how to think — not what to think. Ancient root, modern fruit.

Consequential, Not Contradictory

A child asks: you say God is everywhere, so why send me to the temple? Vishwanath ji’s answer was elegant. It is not a contradiction. It is a consequence. The day you can see the divine everywhere, in everything, you will not need the temple — every place will already be one. Until that day, you go to the temple, because the going is the practice that builds the eye. The same arc runs through vidyā. The student begins with the karma portion — there is something to attain, a duty to perform. Then he reaches the mahāvākyas and is told he is already That. “First you tell me to attain, now you tell me I already am — how?” The confusion is not a flaw in the teaching. It dissolves, step by step, through sādhana. Never contradictory. Always consequential.

Svadharma and the Arjuna Caveat

Modern education treats every child as the same child. An assembly line cannot do otherwise. And this is the source of so much quiet suffering — the student is never pointed toward his own svadharma, toward what he came here to do and what nature has actually endowed in him. Manu, Ashutosh ji reminded us, says the dharma śāstra is taught so that beings may attain sukha. Even dharma is for sukha. One way to reach it is a ten-year course in rules and injunctions. The other way is for a person to see clearly where the source of sukha truly is — and where it is not. Once that is seen, most of the rest follows on its own. Less krodha. Less lobha. Respect for others, not as instruction but as natural conduct. This is Vedanta’s irreplaceable role in education: it tells you where to look.

But Vishwanath ji raised a caveat we must not lose. Many young people are becoming Arjunas — in genuine fear of the vyāvahārika world, they announce they are headed for the pāramārthika, while still seated firmly in the transactional world and still expecting its benefits. These Arjunas have to be sent back to the field. Renunciation handed out before paripakvatā — ripeness — is not Vedanta; it is escape wearing Vedanta’s clothes. This is why the questioning and the right kind of dialogue must continue. The whole Bhāratīya jñāna-paramparā rests on it — look at the Upaniṣads, look at the Gītā, every one of them is a conversation. Bring Vedanta into education without that discipline of dialogue and we will make monks of children who were meant to be warriors. Dixit ji’s prescription was the gentlest: begin with the simple. Satyaṃ vada. Dharmaṃ cara. Speak truth, walk in dharma. Plant the small, beautiful things at the bāla stage, and the child will one day value the whole treasure. Open with the hardest Vedanta and everyone runs.

Neither Tokenism Nor Nostalgia

Two failures wait for us on this road, and we should name them before they trap us. The first is romanticism — the pretence that everything in ancient India was perfect. It was not, and we serve nothing by saying it was. The second is tokenism — adding one Sanskrit subject, renaming a building, declaring we will “bring back Nalanda,” and imagining the work is done. Nalanda was not a name. It was an atmosphere. You cannot resurrect an atmosphere with a press release. The parents have to be inside it. The teachers have to be prepared for it. The seeds, thankfully, are still alive — like those ancient seeds a squirrel buried, recovered after centuries and found still able to sprout. Our task is not to recreate the past. It is to extract the eternal first principles our old systems were built on and rebuild, from first principles, for the future.

Vedanta Belongs at the Beginning

So — Vedanta in education, or Vedanta as education? After this hour I am settled. In our condition today, given how far we have drifted, we must bring Vedanta into education with great care and the right pedagogy. But the deeper truth the panel kept circling is that Vedanta is not a subject you bolt on. Vedanta is education itself.

It is not, whatever the colonial mind whispered to us, a thing you take up on the porch after retirement, or between two trains on a railway platform while the years run out. That image is the measure of how thoroughly we forgot. Vedanta belongs at the beginning of a life, not its epilogue. People keep asking why this civilisation has stopped producing the Brahmagupta, Pingala and Bhaskara level minds. I will say plainly what I believe: we surrendered our own system of education. Restore it — restore the four legs, the five kośas, the teacher who is the curriculum, the silence that vidyā walks toward — and the minds will come. I am quite sure of it.

My deep thanks to Dr. CA Vishwanath, Dr. Ashutosh Simha and Dr. Dattatreya Dixit for a session that gave me far more than I brought to it. And my invitation, to every educator and every institution reading this: do not skim Vedanta. Sit near it. Let it look back at you. Then build.

Link to The Panel Discussion on YouTube:

Note: My name is shown as Swami Suprabhananda by mistake – it is being corrected.

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