Jnana and Yajna

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 4 pages

Two Sanskrit words separated in four pages. Yajna — compassion, or sacrifice — is one of the three aspects of Law, and the subject of Compassion: the Spirit of Truth, the first of the Philaletheians major works. Jnana is higher knowledge, divine or inner wisdom, and the file notes that it is the precursor of the English word knowledge itself.

The substance is Blavatsky's objection, from her article What Shall We Do for Our Fellow-Men?, to the standard rendering of ajnani as "fool" — a translation she attributes to Beal, Oldenberg, Weber and Hardy and calls a worse mistake than the ones before it. Jnana, she argues, is wisdom and more than wisdom: the spiritual knowledge of things divine, unknown to all but those who attain it, which saves the Jivanmuktas who have mastered both Karmayoga and Jnanayoga. If everyone lacking it were a fool, then the whole world save a few Yogis would be composed of fools — which, she remarks, would be out-Carlyling Carlyle on the subject of his countrymen. Ajnana means simply ignorance of the true wisdom, or literally wisdomless, and not at all fool, since every dictionary defines a fool as deficient in intellect and destitute of reason.

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