॥ किमस्ति ज्ञानम्‌ ? ॥ [ What is Knowledge ? ]

॥ वाचने-चिन्तने-पठणे यो भेदोऽस्ति चयाचयो:
  वाचानाद्विदितं भूतं पठणादवगतं भवेत्‌
  वाचानाद्भक्षणं यस्य चर्वणं पठणात्तथा
  चिन्तनात्पाचितं ज्ञानं शेषस्य मलविसर्जनम्‌ !! ॥

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Phonetics >

|| Waachane - chintane - pathane yo bhedosti chayaachayoho
   Waachanaadwiditam bhootam pathanaadawagatam bhawet
   Waachanaadbhakshanam yasya charwanam pathanaattathaa
   chintanaatpaachitam dnyaanam sheshasya malawisarjanam !! ||

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Meaning > 

In today's net and mobile savvy world, I repeatedly come across youngsters [ especially between the teenage upto 30 ], who seem to know so many things, even hold accreditations and degrees of their own line of education, but seem to have understood nothing. !! 
They simply get bowled over when the time comes to put to use what they have learned, and produce impeccable results in practice.
I used to muse over the question ' Why does this happen ? '
There can be more than a single reason behind this affair, but I notice that the most prominent being the misnomer in the minds of these youngsters - mainly ' Information is Knowledge ', just like another one ' Smart is Intelligent.'
Well...that is never so.
Here is a classic from Oriental Philosophy, [ for the benefit of such errants ], which differentiates between information and knowledge.
Essentially, it likens the process of gaining information via our five senses [ like seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing ] to the process of grazing, in the quadrupeds, who go on grazing and gulping the grass till their tummy is full - Internet surfing can be likened to this.
Then the quadrupeds sit under the cool shade of a tree or building, regurgitate the swallowed grass, and keep on masticating it morsel by morsel, which is likened to the process of recitation / mugging up repeatedly, till the information gained is comitted to memory...verbatim.
However as we know, some data can be committed to memory without really understanding the head or tail about it...understanding the ' Why ' and ' How ' about that is still far away.
The process of knowledge gaining starts when one augers the informarion stored in the brain, and ' reflects ' or 'meditates' over it from every possible angle of view, till the ' Why ' and ' How ' of the information dawn on his / her intellect. Once this happens, the meditator is enlightened about the core ideas / principles behind the otherwise meaningless information. This process is likened to the process of digestion, wherein the masticated food is transformed and absorbed by the body completely.
So, I feel that in simple language, ' Knowing something ' is just information [ or data ] gained, ' knowing something by heart ' is information committed to memory, which can be augered at a latter time without understanding the essence of it, and ' knowing something by intellect ' can be labelled as gaining real knowledge.
The learned also say that as all the undigested foodstuff is excreted from the body, such undigested ' infostuff ' is also excreted from the brain quickly. !!! 

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-- RAVISHANKAR.
29th February 2016.