Avidyā

Avidyā, “not-knowing”, is the root problem in most Indian philosophies of liberation. It is not simply the absence of knowledge, as a gap might be filled by learning a fact; it is a positive misapprehension, a way of taking things for what they are not. The Yoga Sūtras define it as taking the impermanent for the permanent, the impure for the pure, suffering for happiness, and what is not the self for the self.

In Advaita Vedānta, avidyā is the beginningless ignorance by which the self is identified with body and mind, and the one Brahman is experienced as a world of separate things. It is removed only by knowledge, as the snake seen in a rope disappears when the rope is seen. Later Advaitins debated where ignorance resides, in the individual self or in Brahman itself, and whether it is one or many; the Vivaraṇa and Bhāmatī schools of Advaita answered differently.

Other traditions use the same word with other meanings. In Buddhism, ignorance (Pali avijjā) is the first link in the chain of dependent origination, the failure to see impermanence, suffering and non-self. Rāmānuja’s school rejects the Advaita idea of a cosmic ignorance, and treats ignorance as the individual self’s karmic obscuration, removed by the Lord’s grace.