“Category Errors in the Study of Bharatīya Jñāna Paramparā”, Pragyata, April 16, 2026
“Modern scholarship often misreads Bharatīya Jñāna Paramparā by forcing it into text-centric, innovation-driven frameworks that do not match its transmission-based nature. This article argues that the confusion arises from deep category errors about what knowledge is and where it resides. Rather than a collection of texts, the tradition functions as an integrated epistemic architecture sustained through guru–śiṣya paramparā. Recognising this distinction reframes continuity not as stagnation, but as disciplined preservation of valid knowing.
1. The Symptom — Persistent Confusion
Across much contemporary scholarship on “Indian Knowledge Systems” — Bharatīya Jñāna Paramparā — produced outside the tradition, a persistent pattern emerges that misrepresents its very nature. Despite an abundance of texts — far exceeding, in volume and continuity, that of most civilizational traditions — the study of Bharatīya Jñāna Paramparā continues to be structurally misread. This does not arise within the living paramparās themselves, where the architecture of knowing is internally self-sustaining. It emerges at the point of translation, when a transmission-based tradition is forced through categories not native to its own epistemic order. What insiders inhabit as lived structure, outsiders encounter only as fragmented data.
The situation is analogous to the familiar parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each man describes what he touches — a leg, a tail, a tusk — but none apprehends the whole as a whole. Their partial accounts arise from two constraints: first, they cannot perceive the totality from their position; second, they cannot even imagine such a totality, because nothing in their prior conceptual world admits the possibility of so large and integrated a form. In much the same way, scholarship situated outside Bharatīya Jñāna Paramparā encounters only fragments—texts, doctrines, practices—while the architectural unity of the tradition remains unseen. What is internally coherent as a living epistemic order is externally reconstructed as a mere collection of disconnected parts, not because the whole is absent, but because the categories required to recognise it are not yet in place……..”
Read full article at pragyata.com
