Ajnana

Ignorance — in Vedanta, specifically the failure to know one’s own nature as atman. The root cause of samsara.

Overview

Ajnana in Vedanta is not ordinary lack of information. It is a specific kind of cognitive error: not knowing what one really is, and consequently mistaking the body-mind for the self. Every secondary problem — fear, desire, grief, threefold suffering — is said to follow from this single misidentification.

Because the diagnosis is ajnana, the prescription is not works, not wealth, not even virtue in itself, but jnana — direct knowledge of the self. That is why Krishna, when Arjuna finally stops defending positions and becomes a disciple in 02-07, does not give him practical battlefield advice. He begins to teach what the self is. The Gita assumes that correctly seeing what we are already disarms the problem.

Related concepts

• jnana — the remedy
• atman — what ajnana hides
• samsara — the condition ajnana sustains
• viveka — the discriminative effort that begins to cut ajnana
• moksha — freedom when ajnana ends

In the Gita

• 02-07 — Arjuna’s admission of confusion is implicitly an admission of ajnana
• 02-11-12 — Krishna opens the knowledge that removes it
• 02-16 — the central teaching that ajnana obscures

Lecture evidence

• Ep. 3 [~12:00]: Ajnana — ignorance of the self — is the root of samsara; jnana is the solution.