Liberal arts the Brahmanical way

In his book Ancient Indian Education: Brahmanical and Buddhist, the nationalist historian Radha Kumud Mookerji describes the ancient Indian philosophy of knowledge as follows:

"Of all the peoples of the world the Hindu is the most impressed and affected by the fact of death as the central fact of life. . .Therefore, he feels he cannot take life seriously, and scheme for it, without a knowledge of the whole scheme of creation. . .Thus he devotes himself to a study of the fundamental truths of life and does not care for half-truths and intermediate truths.

His one aim in life is to solve the problem of death by achieving a knowledge of the whole truth of which Life and Death are parts and phases. He perceives that it is the individual that dies, and not the whole or the Absolute. Thus the Individual must merge himself in the Universal to escape from the sense of change, decay and dissolution. The Absolute is not subject to change. Individuation is Death, a lapse from the Absolute. Individuation results from the pursuit of objective knowledge, and this has to be stopped. [Emphasis added.]"

In other words, throw out your engineering textbooks, friends:

"The individual's supreme duty is thus to achieve his expansion into the Absolute, his self-fulfilment. . . Education must aid in this self-fulfilment, and not in the acquisition of mere objective knowledge. . .[I]t is hopeless to get at the knowledge of the whole in and through its parts, through the individual objects making up the universe. The right way is directly to seek the source of all life and knowledge, and not to acquire knowledge piecemeal by the study of objects."

But consider a yoga class instead:

"It is, therefore, considered as the main business of Education to open up other avenues of knowledge than the mere brain or the outer physical senses. Its method. . .is the method of Yoga, the art of the reconstruction of self by discipline and meditation. . .Thus, Education is a process of control of the Mind, to drive it down to its deeper layers. . .When the Mind is thus led to rest in itself. . .and does not lose itself in the pursuit of the knowledge of individual objects, there dawns and bursts forth on the Mind the totality of knowledge. . ."

And your parents thought your liberal arts degree was bad.