First of all, with regard to Jñāna. This is an ambiguous word. It means either the inferential and verbal knowledge about Reality, or the actual realization of it. As the saint possesses the latter kind of knowledge, his intellectual description of it is accurate and trustworthy, though it is described by way of analogy and symbols; while, in the case of others, whether learned or otherwise, it is bound to be hazy, vague and doubtful. The saint’s knowledge of Reality is therefore mainly known to himself; and as it remains a sealed book to others, it is looked upon as an unreasoned dogma, either believable or unbelievable as one may choose. This is the reason why the saint appears as an enigma and why the ordinary standards fail to judge him. As the Gita tells us (2.29), it strikes as wonder to ordinary people that some rare person becomes able to see the Atman, or that some other is able to hear the sounds and words which emanate from it. Nevertheless, the Gita has supplied us with certain criteria which would determine whether a person who claims or is claimed to be a jñāni is really so or not. These are known as metaphysical criteria, but it must be remembered that they are to be discovered in actual, concrete experience, and are not to be merely assumed for speculative purposes of creating systems of metaphysics and theology out of them. Of course, by being epistemological in nature, they are not to be supposed as having a subjective significance only; they go beyond the subjective experience, inasmuch as they are the characteristics of an object which is one and the only Reality, and which we may call indifferently as God, Absolute, Atman or Brahman. Ontologically and primarily, they belong to the object, though from the point of view of the person who realizes the object by participating in its nature, they become afterwards the criteria of the subjective experience also. The sweetness of a mango resides in the mango, no doubt; but it is at the same time useful to indicate the experience of one who eats it. Though objective, it has to be discovered first in experience.