• What is Information? Why Knowledge is different from information? Knowledge is associated with a conscious being. Why awakening of the buddhi (intellect) is a goal of education. Can Artificial Intelligence replace Consciousness?

For any serious discussion, it is good to clarify the basics of the subject. Therefore, in this issue of the Prabuddha Bharata,where education and the transfer of knowledge are being discussed, let us pause to ask, What is knowledge itself? The answer seems too obvious to question. But is it?

In the winter of 1995 I was invited to deliver a paper at an international philosophical conference organised at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Kolkata. Eminent Indian pundits and foreign philosophers from different fields attended the conference. By the second day, one of the philosophers present—an acquaintance of mine named Gerald Larson, an authority on Samkhya philosophy—interjected repeatedly during the day, ‘We keep talking about “knowledge”, but we seem to be discussing different things. Can we not define the term for the sake of the discussion, so that we understand what we are talking about?’ Having reflected on this question since that time, this article is an attempt to answer it.

Article was first published in the Prabuddha Bharata. The author is the minister-in-charge and President of the Centre Vedantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France.

Concepts of Knowledge

When I first began to study Vedanta over fifty-seven years ago, I would encounter the word ‘knowledge’ in such expressions as ‘the path of knowledge’ (referring to jnana yoga), and ‘Existence Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, Bliss Absolute’ as a translation of Sat-Chit-Ananda.

Being a native English speaker, I was familiar with the common word ‘knowledge’, and so I proceeded with my studies, sure of my understanding of the term, but confused about how it applied in these new contexts.

Encountering the four yogas as described by Swami Vivekananda, I first read about bhakti, raja, and karma yogas. All were intriguing and attractive, but they seemed difficult and far beyond my abilities at the time. I had a little devotion, but not much, so bhakti yoga would be challenging. My mind was restless, making meditation a daunting task. Additionally, karma yoga sounded too much like work, which I didn’t particularly enjoy: the last thing I wanted was to undertake work as a means to realise God. 

Then I came to jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, which Swami Vivekananda also referred to as the path of philosophy. Here was the yoga for me! I was intelligent, a good student, adept at abstract thinking, and naturally drawn to philosophy. This, it seemed, was the perfect path: I could study, learn the philosophy well, and that would somehow lead me to ultimate realisation and liberation! Yes, even at the time, it seemed too easy.

There must be some catch, I thought. But if ultimate illumination was being offered through learning philosophy, I wasn’t going to miss my chance just because it seemed too easy. With further study, I learned, of course, that jnana yoga didn’t primarily mean the study and intellectual understanding of philosophy, though I wasn’t sure what it did mean. When it came to Sat-Chit-Ananda, I found that Swami Vivekananda’s use of the term ‘knowledge absolute’as a translation for ‘chit’ was quite confusing to me. Soon I began to understand that ‘knowledge’ was used here as a synonym for consciousness.

So I began to think in terms of existence, consciousness, and bliss instead of using the word knowledge, as it made at least a little more sense (I didn’t really understand the word ‘consciousness’ either). It was many years before I began to grasp why Swamiji had translated chit as ‘knowledge absolute’. And it is that understanding that forms the basis of this article.

Information

Let us start with the most basic understanding of knowledge: what is known. Data. Facts. Information. Studies. Research. Organised products of collective thought such as philosophy, biology, and English literature. The consequential and the inconsequential, the sacred and the profane. We think, wrongly, that knowledge is what is stored in libraries and databases, recorded on film or audio tape, typed into a computer. A knowledgeable person is one who knows many things.

This is the common understanding: knowledge is information, what is known. And educationist often thought of as the transfer of information from teacher to student. However, though we don’t often make the distinction, we should understand that knowledge is different from information. Information is objective, what can be stored on some material medium (the digital ‘cloud’ is also material).

For that to be knowledge in any sense, it has to be ‘known’ by a conscious subject, a person. That is, we store what has been ‘known’ by people in databases and libraries, where it becomes information. It is only informally referred to as knowledge because it has been known by a conscious agent.

Thus, knowledge is always a conscious experience.

Another way of expressing this is that knowledge, to be knowledge, must be consciously known. Otherwise, it is passive information, stored somewhere on a physical medium. It is this distinction between knowledge and  information that the well-known Sanskrit couplet makes clear:—‘At the time of need, that wealth which is in another’s hand and the knowledge in a book is neither wealth nor knowledge.’

A modern tendency is to think that all knowledge is now easily accessible from the web, and so a main component of education should be learning how to best utilise the web to access knowledge. Thus, web-searching is becoming for many, a substitute for learning.

The same argument is used in arithmetic: every cell phone has a digital calculator, so there is no longer a need to learn the multiplication tables. Yes, learning good research tools is an excellent skill to have. But that isn’t knowledge.

When we actually know something, that knowledge is more than passive information sitting in the mind. It becomes organised, and patterns of relationship with other knowledge we have acquired begin to manifest. Here we come to an important aspect of real knowledge, the knowledge that true education should give us: understanding.

Understanding and Meaning

Sometimes knowledge is used in the sense of understanding, which is an interior experience, higher than information. It cannot be printed on a page because it is not just information but the fact of comprehension itself. This is getting closer to the essence of knowledge, and it is present to some degree in all fully conscious experiences.

An infant opens its eyes and ears to the world and perceives an ocean of sensations, none of which makes sense: the child looks in wonder. Gradually, it learns to distinguish patterns—mother, father, its own hands, its feet. The ocean of sensation begins to make sense as patterns emerge. An ocean of indeterminate sensation gives way to understanding: the beginnings of knowledge. This process of expanding understanding continues throughout life.

All understanding is, in fact, the seeing of patterns, including mega-patterns connecting different systems of lesser patterns. Think of biology, chemistry, astronomy, linguistics, grammar, literature, carpentry, plumbing: it is all the perception of patterns and relationships. As it is a ‘seeing’ of patterns, then, understanding is always conscious experience. Understanding doesn’t exist in a database; it doesn’t exist in a book. It is conscious experience. And it is understanding that a good teacher seeks to awaken in the student.

Information can be stored outside of consciousness. Understanding, on the other hand, is always internal and consciously experienced.‘Ah, now I get it!’ ‘So that’s what it does!’ ‘Aha!’Understanding is the experience of meaning.

It may largely be conveyed as information—that is, it can largely be converted into objective, recordable information, as with the knowledge of history—but it becomes understanding only when it is associated in consciousness with meaning.

Let us look at this a little closer. The experience of meaning takes place, according to Vedantic psychology, in the buddhi, poorly translated as intellect. What in the modern world is known as intellect is actually just the educated manas: the lower mind which questions, doubts, and thinks about things (sankalpa-vikalpātmaka). The buddhi provides knowledge with certainty. It is the buddhi that says, ‘Aha! I understand!’

Education certainly has the task of transferring information to the student, where it is stored in memory, the chitta. But it is the awakening of the buddhi that is the real goal of education: the awakening to meaning, the awakening to understanding (There is a higher, spiritual awakening of the buddhi which is far beyond what I have just described, but what I have described is nonetheless a function of the buddhi, albeit lower than spiritual awakening).

A certain young student hates history: to him, it’s just a collection of boring facts about old stuff. It is just a series of dates and names that he has no use for. Over time, he goes to college, where a history professor explains that we are all products of the past. Without knowing where we have come from, the professor explains, we can’t know who we are, what the world is, or where we are going. History thus teaches us how we have become what we are. Suddenly, history makes sense to the boy, and he falls in love with its study because information has been illuminated by understanding.

In studying mathematics, a young woman begins to learn set theory: the set of integers, the set of even numbers, the set of prime numbers. At first, it is information—just facts that she tries to learn. But as she begins to grasp it—to see it—it becomes understanding. 

Then one day, she realises that all understanding is based on classification into sets—not just the set of numbers, but the set of men, of women, of human beings, of animals, of ferns, of fungi, of rocks, of languages, of verbs, of nouns, of short stories, and on to infinity: knowledge of things is classification; that is, making sets. She has gained understanding, which is knowledge illuminated by meaning, as opposed to dead information.

These examples illustrate another aspect of understanding: through understanding a particular fact, we grasp a principle, however simple, illustrated in that particular, and then we see how it illuminates a wider context.

Understanding, consciously or unconsciously, always reveals more than the immediate information presented. That is where true education happens. Here, we are getting closer to the meaning of the word ‘knowledge’ as used by Swami

Vivekananda in the ‘yoga of knowledge’ and ‘Existence, Knowledge, Bliss Absolute’. We aren’t there yet, but we are closer.

Wisdom as Knowledge

We commonly speak of wisdom, a somewhat vague term that refers to a higher form of knowledge than just knowledge about ‘things’. As we have seen, understanding is always associated with a perception of meaning. Wisdom takes that and goes further: it is the understanding of the meaning of life itself. We may have an understanding of biology, of different languages, of astronomy, and other subjects, but that is not wisdom; we could still be quite foolish in our behaviour. 

Wisdom is always associated with a deeper understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. It can be possessed by an uneducated grandmother, while it can elude a learned professor, because it is not merely the understanding of things, but a deeper understanding of life, existence, and the meaning of it all. The emphasis is on the meaning of larger wholes. A smart person has ready access to a lot of information. An intelligent person has understanding, which includes the ability to relate bits of information into meaningful patterns. A sage is one who has wisdom: the meaning of life. This is the higher purpose of education. And this is where the importance of character development comes into education.

It is vidya (knowledge) as wisdom that is spoken of in the well-known Sanskrit adage: ‘Knowledge brings humility.’

Neither information nor ordinary understanding is necessarily connected to humility. Rather, they often inflate the ego. It is wisdom that grants humility because one sees one’s knowledge in the context of the universe as a whole and one’s place within that. And that is the beginning of higher knowledge.

Again, we see the association with consciousness. A computer isn’t wise, nor is AI (Actually, they aren’t even smart or intelligent). Only a person can be wise. A computer or AI can be programmed to spout what sounds like wisdom. But it is not wisdom until it is understood by a conscious agent. It is just bits and bytes to the computer, even to AI; no, let me correct that; it isn’t even bits or bytes to a computer or AI, because neither is conscious; they are just sophisticated machines that do what they are made to do mechanically, without any conscious involvement, even if they are self-programming. So again, a computer can spout what we recognise to be wisdom, but it becomes wisdom when we recognise it as such; that is, when and only when a conscious agent understands it.

The idea that computers can become so complex that they suddenly become self-conscious shows a profound ignorance of the nature of consciousness, as if it were a result of a process or a result of computing complexity. That is true ignorance, educated ignorance.

Direct, Unmediated Experience as Knowledge

When Swami Vivekananda calls jnana yoga the path of philosophy, he is referring to the practice of shravana and manana in the early stages of the path. Shravana means ‘hearing’ the truth, learning about the truth intellectually and conceptually from a teacher; and manana refers to thinking deeply over what has been heard, analysing it, and looking at it critically—philosophically—from different angles to get a deep understanding. Yes, this is the path of philosophy, but philosophy is only the beginning of the path of jnana yoga. Once deep conviction arises as a result of this thinking, one must practise one-pointed meditation on the truth that has been understood.

This is no longer philosophy as a mental exercise or process; rather, it is the effort to realise in direct experience the conclusions of one’s prior philosophical inquiry. It is still ‘knowledge’ that one is seeking. That is, one is seeking to know directly, immediately, and experientially one’s identity with infinite Reality itself. It is seeking ‘that by knowing which everything here becomes known,’ in the words of the Mundaka Upanishad (1.2).

Let us now look at Swami Vivekananda’s use of ‘knowledge’ to translate the word ‘chit’ in sat-chit-ananda. ‘Knowledge Absolute’ doesn’t mean that Brahman or ultimate Reality is a cosmic database, a cosmic library of all possible information; it doesn’t mean that one who realises Brahman thereby knows how to perform brain surgery or to speak Chinese. To understand the use of the word ‘knowledge’ here, we have to go further.

As we have seen, we have knowledge as information, which isn’t really knowledge at all; and we have knowledge as understanding, and then we have wisdom. There is a higher state of knowledge that we experience even now in our daily lives, but which we never think about in itself: the moment of sudden understanding. We only think about it in relation to what we have understood—a specific problem that we suddenly figure out—not the fact of understanding itself.

As a schoolboy, I was good at higher mathematics. The teacher would sometimes present us with a problem and ask us to come up with the answer. The problem always had something new about it that we hadn’t yet learnt. So at first, I would look at the problem with puzzlement: how can this be worked out? Then suddenly, out of nowhere, as far as I could see, a path to the solution would open up. I would solve it and raise my hand to tell the teacher.

Many times, as I raised my hand, one or two other hands would go up. It was a great mystery to me: I myself didn’t know how I had solved it and wouldn’t be able to describe a process to others for solving it, so how had others come to understand it?

There were several lessons about the mind for me in such experiences. One such lesson is the subject matter of the third chapter of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the Vibhuti Pada: whatever we focus our consciousness on, through the mind, reveals to us its secrets in an almost miraculous way. But what we want to see here is the sudden moment of understanding itself: ‘Aha!’ Not what I had understood, but the moment of understanding itself; that is a distinct experience, the pure experience of knowledge.

And it is for this reason that Swami Vivekananda says: ‘In our country we go down on our knees before the man who reads the Vedas, and we do not care for the man who is studying physics. That is superstition; it is not Vedanta at all. It is utter materialism. With God, every knowledge is sacred. Knowledge is God’.1

This isn’t to say that the ‘Aha!’ we have when we understand a maths problem is the same as the moment of realisation. Our relative ‘Aha!’ is an illumination in the buddhi, the determinative faculty of mind, which gives the stamp of certainty when truth is known. But it is the same function of mind, in a limited sphere, that Sadananda describes in the Vedantasara (197), in which the buddhi takes on the ‘form’ of the Self before it melts into it—the infinite ‘Aha!’ when one realises: Vedaham etam purusam mahantam adityavarnam tamasah parastat—‘I have known that infinite Being, lustrous like the sun, beyond all darkness’. 2

The problem for us is, when we understand anything here in the relative world, we are focused on what we have understood, and not on the understanding itself. In the example cited above, it is the solution to the mathematical problem that is suddenly seen that is focused on, not the ‘Aha’ itself. But it is the light of understanding that is important, and the same in every experience of understanding, and it is the same light of understanding that is directly experienced as the infinite light of Reality itself.

Knowledge of Reality—the goal of jnana yoga and the ‘knowledge absolute’ in sat-chitananda— is the infinite and timeless ‘Aha!’ The ultimate awakening. It isn’t knowledge of facts, it isn’t a process, it isn’t an understanding of complex situations, nor is it bound by time.

It is the infinite ‘Aha!’ in which Reality itself is experienced directly, and one knows in a timeless flash the silent, unmoving, and unspeakable secret of existence itself, and all delusion vanishes. That is the ‘knowledge’ of the path of knowledge, and that is the ‘Knowledge Absolute’, that is also the ‘Existence Absolute’, and ‘Bliss Absolute’: not knowledge of an object or a process of understanding, but the inexpressible and eternal moment in which Reality itself is known as ‘Aha!’ As King Janaka says in the Ashtavakra Samhita (2.11–14), Aho aham namo mahyam … ‘Wonderful am I, salutations to myself!’ He is giving expression to that ‘Aha!’ in which nondual, undifferentiated Truth just is, not as an object but as What Is.

And that is knowledge as used by Swami Vivekananda when referring to Advaita Vedanta: not an object of knowledge, not the act of understanding, not something understood, not perception or perceiving, not even what we understand as wisdom, but pure understanding itself, that ‘by knowing which everything here becomes known.’

That is indeed the goal of all knowledge. Through understanding, we rise above information; through wisdom, we rise above ordinary understanding; and in realisation—the perfection of Wisdom—we rise above all by becoming all.

This cannot be expected of educators, even the best of them. But it helps to know what true knowledge is, from which all partial knowledge come, because it is both the source and the final goal of knowledge itself.

This article began with an anecdote about a philosophical conference at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, held in January 1995. Professor Larson’s question—‘Can’t we define what we mean by “knowledge”?’—arose because ‘knowledge’ was often being used in the sense intended by Swami Vivekananda when he spoke of ‘Knowledge Absolute’, but without any explanation, a usage that is absent in Western thought and language.

However, it is the key, the only key, to understanding what knowledge itself is. All knowledge, at all levels, to be knowledge, is conscious knowledge, as we have seen—that is, it happens in consciousness. 

But knowledge is consciousness itself, the ‘Aha!’ itself when something is understood. And that ‘Aha!’ when freed from all objects and realised in itself, is the infinite light of Knowledge Absolute, which is also ‘infinite understanding’, the secret of existence by which one knows that by which everything is understood.

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The author is the minister-in-charge and President of the Centre Vedantique Ramakrishna in Gretz, France.

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This article was published in the January 2026 issue of Prabuddha Bharata, monthly journal of The Ramakrishna Order started by Swami Vivekananda in 1896. This article is courtesy and copyright Prabuddha Bharata. I have been reading the Prabuddha Bharata for years and found it enlightening. Cost is Rs 400/ for one year and Rs 1150/ for three years. To subscribe   https://advaitaashrama.org/pb-subscribe/