17. And as there is no such thing as a wave; but a word coined to denote the heaving of water; so there is nothing as ignorance but a word fabricated to express the want of knowledge. (Hence the believers in ignorance are mistaken in relying their faith in a power which has no existence whatever).
18. As the water and waves are identic in their true sense, and there is no material difference between them; so both knowledge and ignorance relating to the same thing, and expressing either its presence or absence, there can be no essential difference in their significance.
19. Leaving aside the sights of knowledge and ignorance, there remains that which always exists of itself (that is, the self-existent God exists, beyond both the knowledge and ignorance of men, or whether they know him or not). It is only the contradiction of adverse parties ([Sanskrit: pratiyogi byavaccheda]) that has introduced these words. (i.e., calling the opponents as ignorant and themselves as the knowing, in their mutual altercation with one another).
20. The sights of knowledge and ignorance are nothing; (i.e., they are both blind to the sight of truth): therefore be firm in what is beyond these, and which can neither be known nor ignored by imagination of it.
21. There is some thing which is not any thing, except that it exists in the manner of the intellect and consciousness chit-samvit, and this again has no representation of it, and therefore that ens or sat is said to be inevident avidyá the unknowable.
22. That One Sat being known as this or such, is said to be the destroyer of ignorance; whereas it is want of this knowledge, that gives rise to the false conception of an Avidyá or ignorance. (Avidyá, mithyá, kalpaná signifies ignorance to be a false imagination and personification also, as it is seen in the images of the ten Avidyás here).
23. When knowledge and ignorance are both lost in oblivion within one in the intellect as when both the sun-shine and its shadow are lost in shade of night. (i.e., both the knowledge of the subjective ego and objective non-ego which is caused by ignorance being concentrated in the consciousness of the intellect only within one's self).
24. Then there remains the one only that is to be gained and known, and thus it is, that the loss of ignorance tends to the dissipation of self-knowledge likewise (which is caused by it); just as the want of oil extinguishes the lamp. (Egoism and ignorance being akin to one another, both of them rise and remain and die together ([Sanskrit: ajnánahámkarayoreko satitayorút pattináshau yúgavadeba]).)
25. That what remains afterwards, is either nullity or the whole plenum, in which all these things appear to subsist, or it is nothing at all. (The one is the view of atheists who deny all existence, and the other of máyikas who maintain the visible nature as mere illusion. ([Sanskrit: máyámayamidamakhilam])).