Saraswati, the beautiful white goddess seated on a lotus flowers, is traditionally associated with knowledge, learning, speech and the arts. She reminds us that knowledge can be a form of awakening and that it is not something we possess, but something we continually receive, question, experience and pass.
In March 2024, I was living in Barcelona, waiting for approval to defend my PhD thesis. I had studied as much as I could, and yet this approval was not coming. All the knowledge I had gathered over the years felt almost wasted. Every evening, I started chanting to Saraswati, with my Spanish flatmate who was playing the guitar. In that small daily ritual, I began to understand that there was nothing more to control. I did not need to know more; I needed to trust the journey of learning itself, I had to accept that knowledge would always exceed me. Perhaps this is what study ultimately asks of us.
Śāstra, one of the Five Tenets of Jivamukti Yoga, comes from the Sanskrit root śās: to teach, instruct, or guide. Often translated as scripture, Śāstra is more than a collection of sacred texts. It is knowledge transmitted through a lineage of teachers and experience, meant not simply to inform us, but to transform the way we live. In his commentary of the first verse of the Yoga Sutras, T. Krishnamacharya writes that yoga is Anu–Śāsana Śāstra: experiential, not speculative. The sages received the teachings, lived them, and transmitted their experience to their students; the students, in turn, experienced those teachings in their own lives before becoming able to pass them on. This is how a lineage is established: teachings are received, but they must also be lived through experience.
In Yoga Sūtra 1.7, Patañjali outlines the three main sources of correct knowledge, known as pramāṇas that a practitioner can rely on as an anchor against false beliefs, viparyaya, and false imagination, vikalpa. Pratyakṣānumānāgamāḥ pramāṇāni: direct perception, inference, and āgama – the teachings received through a trustworthy source – are the means of valid knowledge. We do not learn everything alone. We learn through those who came before us: through teachers, texts, traditions, conversations, and lived experience.
The Bhagavad Gītā offers a beautiful description of how knowledge is received. In Chapter 4, verse 34 Krishna tells Arjuna: tad viddhi praṇipātena paripraśnena sevayā, to approach knowledge with humility, sincere questioning, and service. We do not have to surrender our capacity to think. On the contrary, true learning requires us to bring together humility and inquiry, to bow and to ask questions. And the teachers who can transmit knowledge are tattva-darśinaḥ: those who have seen the truth.
My first teacher was my grandfather. He has a library of more than 13.000 books, every single one meticulously catalogued in an Excel spreadsheet. Since I can remember, every Christmas he has given me a book, generally never one I had asked for, but one he thought I should read. Sometimes I understood why immediately. Sometimes it took me years. That is also Śāstra. We receive teachings before we are fully ready to understand them. We carry them with us, then life, experience, and practice reveal something we could not yet see.
And this is where Śāstra meets Svādhyāya: the study of the teachings becomes the study of the Self. There is something profoundly yogic in this understanding of learning. A text can become a mirror of our own behaviors. Knowledge slowly becomes inquiry into our own lives. As Sharon Gannon writes in her commentary of PYS 2.1, “You must be fueled by a burning desire to continuously study the Self, which is only available in the present moment.” Perhaps this is the art of learning: to allow what we know to change us. To receive a teaching, question it, live it, and to pass it on.
My grandfather’s library is still growing and my own books continue to accumulate. But the most important teachings are not the ones that remain on a shelf. They are the ones that become part of how we see, how we act, and how we relate to the world.
