A recent Scroll article argues that India’s guru-shishya tradition undermined critical thinking. As someone who has taught ayurveda for over 25 years, I must respectfully disagree. The problem isn’t with what the classical texts prescribed, but with what we’ve forgotten they contained.

Open any classical ayurvedic text and you’ll find something surprising: questions. Lots of them. The Charaka Samhita, composed around the first century CE, isn’t structured as a guru’s monologue but as a dialogue where students challenge, probe, and demand clarification. The very word “Upanishad” – the foundational Vedic texts – means “sitting down near” for inquiry, not passive absorption.

The Rig Veda’s creation hymn ends with a stunning admission of uncertainty: “Who really knows? Perhaps even the one who looks down from the highest heaven does not know.” This isn’t dogma suppressing questions – it is ancient literature institutionalising intellectual humility.

The classical ayurvedic tradition went further, developing sophisticated methodological........

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