Spirituality in HEIs: The Goose That Should Not Be Cut Open

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There is an old story every child knows. A farmer owns a goose that lays one golden egg each day. It is enough. But enough is a word the greedy mind cannot hear. Why wait for tomorrow's egg, the farmer reasons, when the whole treasure must already be inside? So he takes his knife, opens the bird, and finds nothing — only entrails, and a dead goose. The daily gift is gone because he could not bear that it came slowly.

Spirituality in our universities is that goose.

Left to its own rhythm, it yields something precious every day: a steadying of the mind, a deepening of judgment, a widening of the sympathies, a quiet reordering of what a person takes to be worth living for. These are golden eggs. They cannot be stockpiled, accelerated, or converted into a placement statistic. They come one at a time, on their own schedule, to those who wait.

The careerist mind cannot bear the waiting. It looks at spirituality and asks the farmer's question: where is the whole treasure, now, in a form I can cash? Make it a degree. Attach an outcome. Promise a salary at the end. Cut it open and extract the value in a single stroke.

The same thing happens. What is extracted is not the living thing. You are left holding the vocabulary of the tradition with none of its substance — graduates fluent in the words who have never once been changed by them. The goose is dead, and everyone wonders why the eggs stopped.

But there is a deeper flaw here than impatience, and it is worth naming plainly. Spirituality is, at its root, a training in wanting less. A career is a training in wanting more. When you sell the first as the second — when you dress a discipline of renunciation in the promises of ambition — you do not merely fail to make it pay. You teach the exact opposite of what the words say, while using the words. The student learns to pursue status, security and advantage, and calls the pursuit by the name of the very thing that was meant to loosen its grip. This is not an inefficiency. It is an inversion. A career built on spirituality corrupts spirituality precisely to the degree that it succeeds as a career.

The old gurukula knew how to hold these together without confusion. It taught both aparā vidyā and parā vidyā — the practical knowledge by which one earns a living, and the higher knowledge by which one understands what living is for. But the order mattered. The lower was rooted in the higher. Grammar, mathematics, statecraft, medicine — all the career-bearing sciences — were studied within a horizon that never let the student forget the end they served. Aparā vidyā grew out of the soil of parā vidyā, and drew its proportion and its restraint from that soil. The graduate left able to earn, but also knowing what earning was for, and when to stop.

Our arrangement has quietly reversed this. We have kept the lower knowledge and cut it loose from the higher. The career-bearing sciences now stand on nothing but themselves, and into this rootless field we drop spirituality as one more subject competing for the same students, the same credits, the same placements — asking the higher knowledge to justify itself by the standards of the lower. When education loses its orientation — when aparā is no longer rooted in parā but set beside it as a rival — no quantity of added subjects can restore the lost proportion.

Here a distinction must be made that is too often collapsed. Indian Knowledge Systems and puruṣārtha-based cultural and spiritual education are not the same enterprise, and an institution that has done the first should not imagine it has discharged the second. IKS faces outward. It returns to the tradition to recover insights — in logic, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, architecture, aesthetics — that can contribute to and correct the modern disciplines, and it argues for them, rightly, on contemporary terms. That is valuable work. But it is knowledge placed in the service of modern systems. Cultural and spiritual education faces the other way. It does not exist to contribute to modern systems; it exists to form the human being according to the four puruṣārthas — to order desire, wealth and duty beneath the final aim of liberation. The one enriches the world's disciplines from the tradition. The other transmits the tradition's own account of what a life is for. To run a suite of IKS courses and believe one has thereby nurtured spiritual-cultural formation is to mistake an export for a hearth. This is why the Indianizing of education cannot mean merely the introduction of IKS subjects. The tradition is not a set of subjects; it is an ordering of subjects — a subordinating of the useful to the meaningful. Add the subjects but keep the careerist ordering, and you have only given Indian vocabulary to a foreign orientation.

Nowhere does this confusion cut deeper than in yoga itself, where a dilemma sits at the very root of the field. Is yoga an evidence-based therapeutic protocol — a healing science, clinically validated, opening real professional careers? Or is it a spiritual discipline, aimed at the transformation of the individual and finally at liberation? The honest answer is that it is genuinely both, and this is exactly why institutions lose their footing. People want both at once; the institution tries to deliver both through a single blurred programme; and in the blurring, both are diminished. Faculty are unsure which standard they teach by. Students are unsure which thing they came for. The therapy is thinned by metaphysics it cannot clinically justify, and the spiritual path is cheapened into a wellness credential. Two noble things, mixed, produce confusion in place of either.

The remedy is not to choose one and discard the other. It is to stop mixing them. Let there be a frankly career-oriented yoga therapy programme — evidence-based, clinically rigorous, held to every professional and research norm, with only a light spiritual grounding for context — and let there be no hesitation or apology about it. This is IKS at its best: a healing input, drawn from the tradition, that meets modern standards and provides an honourable livelihood. It deserves to thrive on its own terms, and it does not need to pretend to be a path to mokṣa in order to be worthy.

But the spiritual dimension of yoga must be kept separate, and kept whole. It is not a therapy protocol and cannot be measured as one. Its purpose is to let a seeker immerse in the knowledge — to soak in it, absorb the wisdom, and be slowly changed by it. That work has its own rhythm, its own standards, and its own small and self-selecting body of students. Housed apart, both flourish. Forced together, both are confused — and the confusion runs all the way up: institution, faculty and student each unsure which enterprise they are part of. So the distinction must be drawn clearly and the choice made intentionally, at every level. Let the therapy be honoured as therapy and the path be honoured as a path. And if an institution chooses to keep the spiritual dimension alive out of genuine conviction to the tradition — rather than merely tolerating it until the numbers dip — then it must protect it as something distinct, and never let it be quietly folded into the therapy programme for the sake of tidier accounting.

So there are only two arrangements that do not kill the bird.

Infuse it everywhere. Let spirituality run quietly through every course the institution offers — the engineer's ethics, the physician's compassion, the manager's restraint — not as a subject to be graded but as the air in which every subject is studied. This is the gurukula's own logic: the lower knowledge held within the higher. Here spirituality is not a career; it is the soil careers grow in. It asks for no separate revenue because it was never for sale.

Or keep it separate and unhurried. Set aside a protected space for those who come not for a livelihood but for the thing itself, and let them study with no clock of employability ticking over their shoulder. Few will come. That is not a failure; it is the nature of the pursuit. Support it as one supports a temple or a library — because a civilization needs it, not because it turns a profit.

None of this is a plea for lower standards. The faculty of spirituality, of Sanskrit, of cultural studies should publish, should meet every scholarly norm, should be held to the full rigour asked of any discipline — and they will meet it, for these are demanding fields with living scholarly traditions of their own. Rigour is not the careerist metric. Enrolment is. And the two must not be confused. To judge such a programme by its headcount — to weigh its survival on how many students it attracts against the placement-bearing courses next door — is to apply the one standard the subject can never satisfy, and was never meant to. Small numbers are intrinsic to the pursuit, not evidence against it. A programme may be scholarly, productive and indispensable and still draw few; that fewness is a feature of the terrain, and to make it the ground for closure is simply the knife again, held at a different angle.

The third path is the one we keep drifting toward: dress spirituality as a career, promise it will pay like the others, judge it by the numbers it draws, and then blame the subject when it disappoints. This is the farmer with the knife. It mistakes a daily, patient gift for a lump sum waiting to be cut out — and in the cutting, destroys both the gift and the giver.

Spirituality is brought into academics with good intention. But intention is not enough; the manner of its nurturing is everything. In an age already marked by a widespread erosion of values, a well-meaning endeavour of this kind must not be allowed to fall prey to the predatory, careerist logic of the modern university — whether private or public. That logic will absorb anything, rename it, price it, count it, and wonder why it died.

A civilization is not measured only by what it can monetize. Some of its most necessary goods are exactly the ones that refuse to be rushed or sold or counted. Spirituality is one of them. The institution that cannot hold such a good without first converting it into a career has not found a smarter use for the goose. It has only sharpened its knife.