Hinduism Applied to Business

Applying a religion such as Hinduism to business is laudatory. Undercutting any benefits of doing so, however, is the advocation of religious principles that are so unrealistic in the business world that they undercut the credibility of the project itself. John D. Rockefeller was a Baptist who taught Sunday school at his church even as he pushed competitors out of business who refused to be bought out by Rockefeller’s refining monopoly, Standard Oil Company. To be sure, after retiring, he gave away about half of his $800 million (1913 dollars), but he did not claim that his personal generosity justified his earlier restraint of trade as a monopolist. Rather, he claimed to be more of a “Christ figure” as a monopolist than he was next as a philanthropist. In my study on Rockefeller, I concluded that he was delusional, yet to some extent well-intended, given the destructive competition that was ravaging small businesses in the refining industry during the 1860s. Rockefeller thought of his giant as saving the otherwise presumably drowning competitors, but Jesus in the Gospels does not drown people who are unwilling to be converted. Clearly, the application of religion to business can be abused, including in being much too idealistic, even utopian, and in being used to justify egregious economic tactics and even greed itself.

Although G.D. Birla, a Hindu industrialist when India was trying to achieve political and economic independence from Britain, sought to integrate religious principles both in the establishment and running of his steel company and his later philanthropy, whereas most Christian titans at the time in the West saw their religious principles as pertaining only to charitable giving after having become rich, the application of Vedic knowledge to business is not without its own drawbacks. Specifically, I contend that lofty sounding principles such as bhakti and dharma can sail right over the real world of business, the former being too high to make a dent in the latter. It does the profane no good if the sacred treats the profane as “fly-over territory” between two coasts.

Speaking at a Bhakti Yoga conference hosted by Harvard University in March, 2025, Rajeev Srivastava, a Hindu entrepreneur, advocated applying the Vedic teachings of being a custodian of wealth and giving back as a form of service, including in making donations to charities. That is, he was asserting that the Vedic teaching of trusteeship includes giving back to society as an integral part of business.  Doing business with a purpose that includes profit, but without greed, is key. Srivastava stressed having a spiritual teacher who can teach a business practitioner how to serve. Presumably serving enables a practitioner to include profitability in one’s business purposes and yet without being motivated by greed.

It is ironic, therefore, that business practitioners who can control pride and greed and are motivated by service to God and humanity and seek mentoring by spiritual teachers are, according to Srivastava, more likely to succeed in work tasks and to have profitable businesses. For example, demonstrating integrity and character facilitates raising capital from investors because it is important to them to be able to trust the people who manage their investments through business strategy and operations.  The following terms are relevant: loka-sangraham means having profit as an outcome but not as the purpose; loka-saudhnyam is wealth as entrusted (trustee-oriented); loka-saumitram is the establishment of relationships of love with all stakeholders; sakhya-priti is caring for stakeholders; and jaget-priti is caring for the planet (i.e., accepting the limits of finite natural resources). Admittedly, the notion that managers of a business would come to love stakeholders, which includes employee union heads and government regulators, as well as the media, is far-fetched.

Once in a business seminar on theory construction, I proposed a theory that includes love. Looking back on the assignment and my presentation years later, I felt utterly embarrassed for having come up with such a ridiculous theory of business; the marketing professor had been very charitable towards me in not checking me into a psyche ward so anti-psychotic medication could be applied. I doubt it would have helped. So, I have some “skin in the game” in being critical when religion applied to business goes too far, for I have committed that very sin.

In applying Hinduism, even jaget-priti seems utterly unrealistic. At the very least, even ethical managers of a business naturally are oriented to profitability; even those who are not greedy are oriented, or compartmentalized, to the practice of management, and thus to its mind-frame.  In fact, being oriented to a firm’s profitability is part of the fiduciary responsibility of a management. Of course, if a majority of the ownership of a business, whether private or publicly-owned, wants to use its wealth to care for, and even love stakeholders, fiduciary duty (assuming the rights of minority stockholders are not impaired) can include diverting resources, attention, and even profits to stakeholder groups. In short, applying religion to the business world should not be so unrealistic that the only real application is for marketing purposes. The term, servant leadership, is commonly bandied about for just such a purpose, as is corporate “social responsibility.”

Also speaking at the Bhakti Yoga conference, Prakash Govindan discussed the application of the business jargon, servant leadership, to Hinduism. He said that three terms apply. Dama is the finding inner balance (emotional mastery, inner resources are infinite); daya refers to the mood of compassion (ontological humility); and dana is the joy of giving. Finding inner balance is more realistic than loving and caring for stakeholders, and finding inner peace may actually result in greater compassion if inner security and stability naturally enable a person to feel compassion deeper and more often. Applying Bhakti Yoga to business practitioners, including CEOs, Govindan said that because “the material world and material life [which includes business] is like banging your head against the wall,” he tried silent meditation focused on his heartbeat. Out of that came an orientation to serve, in part to stay humble and not get entitled. It’s not about how much is given; rather, it is the intention that counts.

In Spiritual Leadership in Business (2017), I argue that by engaging in a regime of regular religious experience, whether in prayer, liturgy, or meditation, a manager may be more inclined to be compassionate at work, even in leading an organization. I reason that the enhanced sensitivity to the world, including suffering, happens naturally from engaging in prayer or meditation because yearning experientially in transcendence beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotionality (sensibility) involves enhanced sensitivity. Even just the residue of it can stay with a person back in the world, meaning that one’s sensitivity generally, and including to other living beings, is greater than without having experienced religious transcendence. This application of spirituality (being practiced regularly) to business is much preferable to dogmatic preaching of religious tenets. In fact, regular religious experience may naturally result in that which the tenets intentionally prescribe. What happens automatically is, I submit, more reliable than what depends on intention. This is not to say, however, that regular religious practice will cause business managers to love stakeholders, but relations could improve by being naturally more sensitive to the other. Smoothing the rough edges rather than turning things upside-down in attempting to instill a utopian dream may be how religion can be relevant in the world of business. For to simply whitewash the profane with the sacred would make heaven a tautology.

Renunciation in Hinduism

The concept of renunciation in Hinduism has been subject to astonishingly different interpretations. Renunciation has been thought to necessitate meditation that one’s self is essentially the same as brahman, which is being itself, which can be realized by focusing on being conscious, or aware, without distracting thoughts and desires. This is Shankara’s position, whereas Ramanuja, who emphasized Bhukti devotion to the god Krishna, saw renunciation as detachment from desires without giving up action. Detached action or meditation. Which is preferred. In the Bhagavad-Gita, the former has the upper hand, but that does not mean that the text does not contain contradicting passages. It may that transcending contradiction lies above knowledge as well as renunciation in either of its meanings.

In chapter 5 of the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that dispassionate action is superior to renunciation. Regarding renunciation and Karma-Yoga, “the Karma-Yoga is better than (mere) renunciation of action.”[1] In the next chapter, Krishna essentially redefines renunciation as pertaining to a person “who performs the action to be done, regardless of action’s fruit.” Such a person is “a renouncer and a yogin.” In contrast, a person who “is inactive” is not.[2] In short, not only is karma-yoga better than renunciation of action, the latter but not the former is actually renunciation. This is antithetical to Advaita philosophy, so it is difficult for me to conceive of how it and Gita 6.1 can be reconciled, but why must everything be reconciled in a religious text, a faith-narrative, if it contains different paths that lead to the same end even though they jostle for supremacy over the other means? Historical and form criticism pale in comparison to resisting the temptation to eclipse the distinctly religious meaning in a faith-narrative. Hans Frei, in Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, advocates focusing on the meaning while reading and studying a religious text. This approach was arguably the Yale hermeneutical theology, Brevard Child’s canonical method notwithstanding, during at least the last few decades of the twentieth century.

Even though Frei’s hermeneutic is applicable even to Hinduism, positing one, consistent religious meaning onto the Gita may actually be but a gloss imported from the Abrahamic religions in place of what are actually several distinct, even contradictory religious meanings. Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances may be apt in describing the relations thereof, but even that notion does not account for contradictions. Foisting one consistent religious meaning on a text may also be a projection of the rationalist reader rather than being in the text itself. Lest such a reader be disappointed, liberation (moksa) can be said to be a Hegelian synthesis at a higher level than either interpretation of renunciation. Brahman itself, including the consciousness (raw awareness) that being itself has (or is), transcends pairs of opposites, whereas the Gita itself does not.

To be sure, that text does point beyond its internal contradictions, and thus itself. After having Krishna assert that a person “who does not hate or hanker after (anything) is to be known as a perpetual renouncer,” the author has that deity state: “For, without (the influence of) the pairs-of-opposites, [such a person] is easily released from bondage.”[3] By implication, Brahman transcends pairs-of-opposites too, a person’s atman (self) being in reality the same as Brahman. Indeed, yogins whose “defilements have dwindled, (whose) dualities are destroyed, (whose) selves are controlled, (and who) delight in the good of all beings” reach “extinction in the world-ground.”[4] Transcending dualities in the world ultimate results in one’s very self (atman) no longer being a distinct entity in brahman, which is being itself. Even the apparent contradiction in that which has been extinguished being in being is transcended by a yogin.

Hence, a scripture itself can imply that the pairs-of-opposites within it can be, and in fact actually are, transcended by enlightened readers. Moreover, as the example of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna illustrates, scripture itself can be transcended by genuine religious experience, such as in devotion to a deity. It is a pity that literalist religionists hold such people back in what Nietzsche calls the ressentiment of the weak who foist, “Thou shalt not!” to beguile the strong, free-spirits from confidently exercising their innate strength. Breathing in bad air can compromise a person’s vitality. Whether or not to apply philosophical texts in interpreting religious texts is just one instance of the tension, the strong being bold in drawing on what is for others exogenous material.

In Gita 6.8, Krishna lauds the yogin whose “self is satisfied with knowledge and worldly knowledge.”[5] Is he referring respectively to scripture and secular book-knowledge? If so, then the earlier verse in which Krishna states that certain “ascetics of severe vows” offer “material-objects as sacrifice, austerity (tapas) as sacrifice, Yoga as sacrifice, and knowledge (gained from) study as sacrifice” seems to be contradicted.[6] But not everything listed is exogenous to religion, as yoga is included. Furthermore, Feuerstein claims that the compound svadhyaya-jnana “could possibly be translated as ‘book knowledge,’ but the phrase could also mean ‘knowledge and study.”[7] Especially the latter translation does not in itself exclude the study of a scriptural text, such as the Upanishads or the Gita. I may have projected the contradiction that exists in historical Christianity, wherein Paul eschewed the knowledge of Athens and yet Augustine and Aquinas drew copiously on Plato and Aristotle, respectively (though not completely respectively). Drawing on Eliade and Geertz, it may be said that knowing the otherness of the other requires bracketing (époché) one’s own background.  Adding Nietzsche, it can be said that a sufficient strength of will-power is necessary to master the seemingly intractable instinctual (innate) urges of egotism.

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1. Gita 5.2 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 149.
2. Gita 6.1. in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 157.
3. Gita 5.3 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 149. I have changed Feuerstein’s use of brackets to parentheses because in quoting Feuerstein’s text, I use brackets to add words to those which Feuerstein has written. This is consistent with Feuerstein having used brackets to add words to the text he was translating. I submit that this is a legitimate exception to the general rule that that which is quoted should be quoted as is, including the punctuation marks in the text.
4. Gita 5.25 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 155. Italics added to certain English words.
5. Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 159.
6. Gita 4.28 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 143.
7. Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 143n29.

Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical

In this essay, I provide a synopsis of my booklet on spiritual leadership in business. In the text, I suggest that while it may convenient in the business world to conceptualize spiritual leadership as being essentially ethical in nature, this convenient tactic does not do justice to the distinctly religious basis and connotations of spirituality. By religion, I do not mean only theism, or even just organized religion (i.e., religious organizations); rather, I have in mind religious experience—whether through prayer, meditation, worship, or another means that is oriented to yearning beyond the limits of cognition, sentiment, and perception—as if an inherently limited human brain were nonetheless “hard-wired” for beyondness itself whether or not a transcendent religious object (e.g., a deity) exists. Rather than expunging spiritual from its native terrain and reconfiguring it to fit within a secular context as ethics, we can relate the religious sense of spirituality to the secular world of business with due deference to their respective natures rather than muddling them into something murky.[1]

The full essay is at "Spiritual Leadership in Business."

The booklet, Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

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1. By analogy, the notion that Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine—a theory coined at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E.—involves taking the human as human and the divine as divine rather than reconfiguring one term to suit the other. Just as one essence, or ousia, has a human element and a divine element, spiritual leadership can be reckoned as having a religious and a secular element. One essence can contain a notion of spirituality that is religious in nature and a theory of leadership that is been derived in a secular context.