Does anyone know whether the Muslim word Jannah came from the Buddhist word Jhana?
The PÄli word JhÄna comes from the Sanskrit DhyÄna.
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:
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 Buddhaâs time.
There are some Arabic words from India: ŰłÙ۱ - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
But, yeah, seems not this one!
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 Buddhaâs time, nearly a millennium after the Indus Valley Civilization had collapsed. Your argument assumes, without evidence, that once trading started it never stopped.
Isnât 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.
100%! Thatâs 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 doesnât appear to be a borrowing from an Indo-Iranian language.
The meaning of related words isnât really similar to the meaning of jhÄna. The Semitic root seems carry the sense of âcoveringâ or âprotectingâ. Janna literally means âgardenâ 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 âgardenâ also seems to point against there being some sort of etymological link. The meaning of âgardenâ seems pretty dissimilar from the meaning of jhÄna, which doesnât really mean âparadiseâ or âheavenâ anyway.
There are also a lot of other words derived from the same root as janna which have a meaning which isnât really at all similar to jhÄna. It seems hard to explain this on the basis that these words are all derived from jhÄna.
I donât think that they do. Nibbana seems to be pretty explicitly distinguished from various heavenly existences in the Suttas, as well as with the jhÄnas.