Did Jannah come from Jhana?

Does anyone know whether the Muslim word Jannah came from the Buddhist word Jhana?

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The Pāli word Jhāna comes from the Sanskrit Dhyāna.
Arabic is not a PIE language, so the word jannah would not be related, except as a loan word.

But it seems not. See here:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ŰŹÙ†Ű©

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Looking it up, the Arabs were trading with people in the Indus Valley going back to 2000 BCE. So we know that Arabs had contact with Buddhists during the Buddha’s time.

There are some Arabic words from India: ŰłÙƒŰ± - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

But, yeah, seems not this one! :blush:

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Evidence of trade between the Indus Valley Civilization and the Mesopotamian and Arabian Peninsula peoples in 2000 BCE is not evidence that there were still trading relations in the Buddha’s time, nearly a millennium after the Indus Valley Civilization had collapsed. Your argument assumes, without evidence, that once trading started it never stopped.

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Isn’t it interesting how the Arabic word for paradise is jannah,
and the word for meditative absorption (which leads to blissful insight) is also spelled as jhana?

The rousing of insight into the four foundations alongside with progress with the four meditative absorptions readily leads to rapture, please, contentment, satisfaction, equanimity and so on. Surely, then, that cultivation of the four jhanas is what gets us close to something like a paradise.

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100%! That’s what I mean
 The definition of both words has meaningful overlap. Nibbana and Paradise sound like similar concepts.

It seems pretty unlikely.

The word janna appears to come from an old Semitic root, as the cognates also exist in Hebrew, Aramaic and Ugaritic, which are attested much earlier than Arabic. It doesn’t appear to be a borrowing from an Indo-Iranian language.

The meaning of related words isn’t really similar to the meaning of jhāna. The Semitic root seems carry the sense of ‘covering’ or ‘protecting’. Janna literally means ‘garden’ and was derived from this root. It came to be a word for heaven, which is not surprising considering that the speakers lived in an arid region.

The fact that the word literally means ‘garden’ also seems to point against there being some sort of etymological link. The meaning of ‘garden’ seems pretty dissimilar from the meaning of jhāna, which doesn’t really mean ‘paradise’ or ‘heaven’ anyway.

There are also a lot of other words derived from the same root as janna which have a meaning which isn’t really at all similar to jhāna. It seems hard to explain this on the basis that these words are all derived from jhāna.

I don’t think that they do. Nibbana seems to be pretty explicitly distinguished from various heavenly existences in the Suttas, as well as with the jhānas.