Aparokṣa Jñāna

I loved asking questions as a child. I would not let my mother sleep at night with all my inquiries. My parents always patiently answered them all. They used to be on the road a lot, and the entire journey would be a probe, pointing at random things and asking the what, how, why, and when.

I remember being very excited each day while going to school. I would not just walk from my house to the bus stop but dance through the way, singing at the top of my voice, ‘Main toh school ja rahi hun, school ja rahi hun!’ (I’m going to school!). The curiosity in me loved that place, since that’s where I got to learn something new every day.

Somewhere along the way, though, something shifted. It was not an exact moment that changed something but a slow sequence of events, one after another, each trying to shut down the inquiry within me. I remember this feeling quite vividly, not the details around it, but the feeling. It was humiliation. A teacher asking me if I thought I knew better than the book, and a room full of children laughing. I had raised my hand to say that I didn’t think different parts of the tongue tasted different things. I could taste everything everywhere. The textbook didn’t match what my own tongue was telling me, and I said so.

The humiliation that followed didn’t erase the question. It just taught me where questions were and were not welcome. The science that would have vindicated me had already existed. Researchers had debunked the tongue map in 1974, more than three decades before I raised my hand in that classroom. The textbook my teacher defended with such certainty had been wrong for longer than she had been teaching. I don’t remember her name. The teachers who stayed with me were not products of the system. They were its exceptions. It has always made me wonder what a system that produced more exceptions by design would look like.

There is a distinction the Vedantic tradition makes that the modern system has not quite found a name for. Parokṣa jñāna is indirect knowledge that is received, stored and reproducible on demand. The textbook’s claim about taste was parokṣa jñāna. My tongue’s testimony was something else—aparokṣa jñāna, direct knowing, the kind that changes the structure of perception rather than adding to its contents. The classroom that day made a choice about which kind of knowing counted. It chose the book.

In ancient times, formal education followed the Guru-Śiṣya paramparā and was set in a Gurukul, which was not always a building but a journey. Students left home, not to receive information, but to be in proximity with someone who had arrived somewhere. The Gurukul understood that the most important knowledge was too subtle to be articulated and could only be absorbed through years of presence rather than delivered in a few lectures.

Listening to the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa‘s Bāla Kāṇḍa as a child, I used to wonder what it would’ve been like to be with a Guru who takes the student into the world and teaches in motion. What would it be like to be in a Gurukul without walls, a curriculum without a syllabus, knowledge as whatever the situation required? Viśvāmitra’s Gurukul was a journey through a forest. It was travel, with the forest as classroom and the road as curriculum. He does not teach Rāma what he will need to know. He puts Rāma in situations where he discovers it. With the edges of the tiny box trying to cut the edges of my personality, in an attempt to fit me into it, the urge to fly back to the time of the Gurukul grew within me each day. I used to imagine myself learning in a forest, in the arms of nature, where my questions would not be shut down.

I do realise that the Rāmāyaṇa is a composed literary text and not a documentary record of actual educational practice. It cannot be read simply as a description of how ordinary Gurukuls functioned. Yet it can be explored as a proposal for what education can look like. A curriculum that arrives as lived encounter and not as a scheduled lesson.

It still lives within me as a utopian paradise that happens to be in the past, where individuality didn’t die but flourished. The more I got to know about how it worked, the more I was pulled towards it. Viśvāmitra taught Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa the Balā and Atibalā mantras before anything else, the hymns that protect from hunger, thirst, and fatigue. The learning was practical and survival-oriented before it was philosophical.

The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa are two epics that have echoed in every other Indian household. We have grown up on these stories; they have shaped the way we think and the way we deal with situations in life. I remember watching them on TV, one version as a child, another as I grew up. The events organised around their recitation, interpretation, and sometimes even enactment are an inseparable part of Indian culture. The events like the kathās from the vācakas and paurāṇikas, the Sundara Kāṇḍa pāṭha organised before the beginning of anything auspicious, the Rāmlīlā enacted in every other town before Dussehra are various ways the epics have stayed alive in the consciousness of the society.

So, I knew the stories inside out, but I still had not read them thoroughly. In my early twenties I decided I wanted to change that. I started with the Mahābhārata, with the Ādi Parva, as another piece of literary evidence in my inquiry into the ancient education system. It holds the most detailed account of Gurukul pedagogy I would find in any Indian text. I discovered that Droṇa’s Gurukul was specialised as military training for royal students. It operated under institutional patronage, with Droṇa appointed by Bhīṣma, which changed its social obligations compared to a forest hermitage.

I compared it to what I had found in the Rāmāyaṇa and remember thinking of it not as the evolution of the Gurukul but as a different form of it, one that was not designed for everyone. It was education with a purpose. It was education as preparation for a specific role in a specific social order. I knew the story already. The Gurukul was established for the Kuru princes, both Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas, in the forest outside Hastināpura. The new thing I learned was how the Gurukul specialised in shaping the personalities of the princes. The curriculum included archery, military science, philosophy, and statecraft, everything that would be useful for their future roles. Droṇa taught Kṣatriya princes to fulfil their dharma as warriors and rulers. The curriculum was not universal, but targeted.

The more I dived in, the more I fished out. Each student had a specific relationship with the teacher. Droṇa’s Gurukul was not about equality or inclusion. It was meritocratic. Droṇa’s differential investment in Arjuna was not simply favouritism; it was a teacher recognising what each student was capable of becoming and transmitting accordingly. Ekalavya’s story has always been heartbreaking for me, until recently when I began to see it differently.

The epic literature is what I grew up with, but I realised it was not considered a historical record. So as I grew up, I turned to the Vedic sources while studying literature at university. I had taken up English as my major, but I realised I was more drawn to the ancient Sanskrit texts, for their mind-bending questions.

In my quest to know more about the Gurukul, I came across Atharvaveda 11.5, the brahmacarya hymn, which describes the student’s life and the teacher-student bond in its daily, embodied form. At first the inquirer in me dismissed it, wondering what celibacy could have to do with education. But the same inquiry led me to dig deeper, and I found that brahmacarya in the Gurukul context means far more than celibacy. It was the early rising, the fire-tending, the begging for alms, the physical service, the oral study, the embodied discipline, an entire way of life. The most beautiful verse I found describing the role of a Guru in a Śiṣya’s life says-

आचार्य उपनयमानो ब्रह्मचारिणं कृणुते गर्भमन्तः ।
तं रात्रीस्तिस्र उदरे बिभर्ति तं जातं द्रष्टुमभिसंयन्ति देवाः ॥३॥

ācārya upanayamāno brahmacāriṇaṃ kṛṇute garbham antaḥ |
taṃ rātrīs tisra udare bibharti taṃ jātaṃ draṣṭum abhisaṃyanti devāḥ ||

“When the teacher receives the Brahmakârin as a disciple, he places him as a foetus inside (of his body). He carries him for three nights in his belly: when he is born the gods gather about to see him.”
(Atharvaveda 11.5.3)

I was amazed by the hymn’s understanding of brahmacarya as a cosmic force. The metaphor of the teacher carrying the student as an embryo brought me closer to what I had always intuited. How the proximity to the teacher mattered the most. How the transformation required was not informational but ontological.

Chāndogya Upaniṣad 4.4 to 4.9 tells the story of Satyakāma Jābāla, the son of a maidservant who, moving between many households in her youth, could not tell him who his father was. He tells the ṛṣi Gautama this truth. Gautama accepts him, saying that only a brahmin by character, a true seeker of truth, would have answered so honestly. Gautama was testing for aparokṣa jñāna. Not what Satyakāma knew but what he was. Satyakāma becomes a great teacher himself, attested in later sections of the same Upaniṣad. The admission criterion for the Gurukul, at its most rigorous, was not examination but encounter. It was a teacher looking at the student and recognising whether something genuine was present. The modern admission system tests information. The Gurukul’s admission, at least in this story, tested character.

The six-year-old still dancing her way to school somewhere inside me found relief in this, reading as an adult about a way of learning that was never only information delivery. Another such moment of relief came while reading the first chapter, the Śikṣāvallī, of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, which happens to be about education itself. It is among the earliest surviving records of the pedagogical structure of Vedic education, and it contains the student’s initiatory promise, the vow of brahmacarya, the teacher’s prayer for mutual success, the shape of the curriculum, the ethical duties of both teacher and student, a convocation address to graduating students, and the departing student’s final acknowledgment.

The teacher instructs the departing student to speak the truth, to practise dharma, not to neglect their learning, not to neglect their duties to the gods and the ancestors, to honour their mother as a god, to honour their father as a god, to honour their teacher as a god and to honour their guest as a god. The relationship between the Guru and Śiṣya is bilateral. The teacher prays that may fame come to us both and may the radiance of Brahman come to us both.

The Śikṣāvallī is normative rather than descriptive. Yet it was a relief to read the convocation address it preserves, one of the oldest graduation speeches in world literature. The last counsel of that address is not a declaration but an instruction- if you are ever in doubt about an act or about conduct, follow the way of those who are thoughtful, devoted, not harsh, and lovers of dharma. The Gurukul’s final lesson was not a fact but a method for navigating facts that haven’t arrived yet. A modern examination system cannot produce this. It can only test what it has already delivered.

No teacher ever told me what to do when in doubt. It was through the presence of my parents and my maternal grandparents that I learned to navigate the seas of doubt and conflict in life, while I felt excluded in the school’s system.

That word, excluded, matters. The oral tradition of the Gurukul had no mechanism for excluding even a blind student. Dīrghatamas, traditionally described as born blind, composed twenty-five hymns of the Rigveda, including its most philosophically celebrated verse. The print-based system that replaced the oral one would have classified him as needing accommodation. Aṣṭāvakra, born with eight deformities, is credited with the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā, one of Advaita Vedānta’s most celebrated texts. Dhṛtarāṣṭra, blind from birth, received the complete royal education alongside sighted princes. The system had no category for disability because it had no standard against which difference could fail. The question of what a system without a standard makes possible deserves its own essay.

The earliest demonstrably historical large-scale site of Guru-Śiṣya education was Takṣaśilā, which functioned not as a centralised campus but as a network of independent ācārya-maintained Gurukuls within a city. Students chose teachers by reputation, and there was no fixed duration like the degrees that modern universities provide. The student progressed at their own pace until the teacher was satisfied. Later accounts remember it drawing more than ten thousand students from across Asia and beyond, from as far as Babylon, Greece, and Persia, and sixty-eight subjects are traditionally said to have been taught there.

Tradition places some famous students there, namely Pāṇini, whose Aṣṭādhyāyī observes language in a manner that has no parallel among the Greek or Latin grammarians; Cāṇakya, credited with the Arthaśāstra, one of the most sophisticated political and economic texts in world literature; and Jīvaka, whose medical training at Takṣaśilā the Pali texts record, and who became the Buddha’s physician. The stories surrounding them may have gathered legend over time, but their intellectual legacy is real and continues to shape the world. The Gurukul system produced something verifiable and world-historically significant. As a child, I was deeply influenced by Cāṇakya, who was reportedly born poor yet went on to shape the Mauryan Empire after being educated at Takṣaśilā through the Guru-Śiṣya system.

According to the Kathāsaritsāgara, Pāṇini struggled as a student and went to the Himalayas to seek knowledge through penance. The grammarians’ legend adds that Śiva, pleased by his devotion, sounded his ḍamaru fourteen times, and the reverberating sounds inspired him to write the Māheśvara Sūtras, the phoneme-organising verses that open the Aṣṭādhyāyī. A slow learner went on to be called the father of linguistics. It disturbs me deeply to think what the modern system would have done to a slow learner like Pāṇini.

Takṣaśilā did not decline on its own. When the Chinese pilgrim Faxian visited around 400 CE, he found the city still alive, its monasteries flourishing. The Hun invasions of the fifth century broke it. When Xuanzang came two centuries later, he found the city half-ruined and desolate, its monasteries emptied. Takṣaśilā collapsed as a centre of learning around the fifth century CE, and Nalanda, the tradition’s later great seat, was destroyed in 1193. I think it is the greatest loss that we have suffered as a civilisation.

I have long wondered who would want to replace such a beautiful tradition with the parrot-like cramming system of education. The invasions and destruction that Indian soil endured were certainly responsible, but the final straw was the White Man’s Burden, six decades before Kipling gave it a name.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” explicitly proposed displacing Indian educational traditions in favour of a system producing English-literate administrators. Macaulay’s stated objective was “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Imagine finding out that the Gurukul didn’t fail. It was deliberately displaced. The Minute did not act alone; what Macaulay displaced was the surviving remnant of a system that had already undergone centuries of disruption since Takṣaśilā and Nalanda fell. But the displacement of that remnant was deliberate, and it was written down. The hand-raising little girl in me would have a lot of questions for the man and his burden.

Macaulay claimed that he’d “never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” What appalled me the most when I first read the Minute was that it explicitly states he had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic. He did not evaluate anything. He declared himself willing to accept Oriental learning “at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves,” having already claimed that he had formed “a correct estimate” of their value from translations and conversations with the same Orientalists. So he outsourced a judgment he was unequipped to make, then reported it as the concession of the very scholars he was overruling. He displaced entire literary and educational traditions by simply declaring. This is not colonialism simply as tragedy but as arrogance so barbaric that it doesn’t even feel the need to look at what it’s destroying.

Paulo Freire’s banking model came as a diagnosis of the system Macaulay produced. A system in which the teacher is the depositor and the student is the account. Knowledge is deposited, stored, and reproduced on demand. The student’s critical consciousness, their capacity to question the conditions of their own existence, is systematically suppressed, because a critical consciousness is incompatible with the administrative function the system was designed to serve. Freire developed this analysis among Brazil’s rural poor, but the mechanism he describes is exactly what colonial education policy produced wherever it operated. A system that would end up humiliating little children for their questions.

I wanted to understand the system from the inside. After exploring literature during my master’s degree, I enrolled in a B.Ed course specialising in learning disabilities, to learn better what the modern education system is doing to be more accommodating. After spending years learning about the system, within the system, I found that it continues to define learning against the standard of an average student. Inclusion often means adapting the child to the curriculum through accommodations, modified assessments, or additional support. The underlying architecture of education remains largely unchanged. The question is still about how a student can fit into the system rather than how the system can recognise the unique way in which a student comes to know. The Guru-Śiṣya tradition, at least in its ideal, appears to have begun from a different premise. The teacher did not merely transmit the same body of knowledge to every student but recognised differing capacities, dispositions, and adhikāra before guiding each student accordingly. The aim was not uniform outcomes but the unfolding of individual potential.

And then came AI. It completes the banking model, and in doing so exposes exactly what the Gurukul understood and the banking model forgot. AI can answer any question, adapt its explanation to any level, offer infinite patience, personalise delivery to individual learning patterns, and do all of this at scale and at almost zero marginal cost. The delivery of parokṣa jñāna has been fully automated.

What was education actually for, if its information-delivery function can be replaced? The Gurukul’s answer, stated in the Atharvaveda’s brahmacarya hymn, lived at Takṣaśilā, implicit in Satyakāma’s story, is that education was never primarily for information delivery. It was for the transmission of character, the cultivation of judgment, and the development of inquiry in the presence of someone who has developed their own.

Aparokṣa jñāna, the kind of knowing that changes the structure of perception, cannot be delivered at all. It has to be generated by the learner through direct encounter. The Gurukul’s entire architecture, from residential proximity and embodied practice to bilateral obligation and learning through doing alongside someone who has done it, was designed precisely for the conditions under which aparokṣa jñāna is most likely to arise. AI cannot replicate any of these conditions. It can only perfect the delivery of what those conditions were never primarily for.

The banking model’s assumption that education is primarily information delivery was always wrong. We now have the machine that can do information delivery perfectly, and it has not solved education. The Gurukul knew why it wouldn’t, and it built everything around the thing the machine cannot do. The question is not whether to restore the Gurukul. It is whether anything in the present system holds the function the Gurukul held, and if not, what would need to change for it to do so.

Ekalavya’s story became a different kind of warning in the AI age. Ekalavya, the Niṣāda prince Droṇa refused to teach, learned by practising before a clay image of a teacher who did not know he existed. He developed genuine skill but when it was discovered, he was asked for his right thumb as the guru-dakṣiṇā. Despite his skill, he was still excluded from the social recognition that formal transmission would have conferred. AI-educated students may face Ekalavya’s problem. They will have genuine knowledge, acquired through the representation of a teacher who never knew them. And the institutions that confer recognition may require the thumb anyway.

Citations: Virginia Collings, “Human Taste Response as a Function of Locus of Stimulation on the Tongue and Soft Palate,” Perception & Psychophysics, 1974. The distinction between parokṣa jñāna and aparokṣa jñāna is foundational to Advaita Vedānta, most directly treated in the Aparokṣānubhūti, attributed to Śaṅkara, c. 8th century CE, though authorship is debated in modern scholarship; the distinction itself is not in dispute. Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa, Bāla Kāṇḍa; the core epic is dated by scholars to c. 8th to 4th centuries BCE, with the Bāla Kāṇḍa generally regarded as a later stratum. Mahābhārata, Ādi Parva, traditionally attributed to Vyāsa, composed c. 400 BCE to 400 CE. Mahābhārata, Vana Parva, chapters 132 to 134, for the story of Aṣṭāvakra. Chāndogya Upaniṣad 4.4 to 4.9, for the story of Satyakāma Jābāla. Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads, Oxford University Press, 1998. Taittirīya Upaniṣad, Śikṣāvallī, Yajurveda, c. 6th century BCE. F. Max Müller, The Upanishads, Part II, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 15, Clarendon Press, 1884, for the Śikṣāvallī convocation address. Atharvaveda 11.5.3. Maurice Bloomfield, Hymns of the Atharva-Veda, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. 42, Clarendon Press, 1897. Rigveda 1.140 to 1.164, for the hymns of Dīrghatamas. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Oxford University Press, 2014. Takṣaśilā: UNESCO World Heritage documentation, 1980, for the site; John Marshall, Taxila, Cambridge University Press, 1951, for the excavations and the city’s destruction; Radha Kumud Mookerji, Ancient Indian Education: Brahmanical and Buddhist, Macmillan, 1947, and Hartmut Scharfe, Education in Ancient India, Brill, 2002, for the traditional accounts of students and subjects. Faxian’s account: James Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, Clarendon Press, 1886. Xuanzang’s account: Samuel Beal, Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, Trübner, 1884. Somadeva, Kathāsaritsāgara, c. 11th century CE, drawing on the lost Bṛhatkathā, for the legend of Pāṇini’s education. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” February 2, 1835, primary document. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, originally published in Portuguese, 1968; English translation by Myra Bergman Ramos, Herder and Herder, 1970.

This essay sits at the intersection of Education & Learning, Philosophy & Existence and Mind & Entanglement.