Moksha

← Encyclopedia

A chariot has halted between two armies that are about to destroy each other, and the warrior in it will not fight. What follows is not a battle order but a discourse on how the soul gets free. The frame is jarring on purpose: the most influential Indian teaching on release from death is delivered on the threshold of mass killing, by a charioteer who turns out to be God. The Sanskrit word is moksha — from the root muc, to loosen, to let go, to set loose a tethered animal — and it names the undoing of the one bond no sword can cut: the round of birth, action, death, and rebirth that the tradition calls samsara. It is the last of the four things a human life is for, and it dissolves the other three.

The fourth aim and the Upanishadic turn

Classical Hindu thought organizes a human life around four legitimate ends, the purusharthas: dharma, the duty and moral order one is born into; artha, the pursuit of wealth and security; kama, pleasure and desire; and moksha, release. The first three belong to a life lived inside the world. The fourth steps outside it, and in stepping outside relativizes the rest — it is named, in the texts that elevate it, parama-purushartha, the highest aim, the one beyond which there is nothing further to want. To call moksha the supreme end is already to make a judgment about the others: dharma, artha, and kama remain worth pursuing, but they keep a person inside the wheel they think they are mastering.

This was not always the architecture. The older layer of Vedic religion was a religion of ritual and reward — sacrifices precisely performed to secure cattle, sons, long life, and a place in the world of the fathers after death. That world after death was not yet an escape; it was more of the same, a heaven from which one could fall and be born again. The decisive shift comes with the Upanishads, the speculative texts appended to the Vedas in roughly the first half of the first millennium BCE, where the prize quietly changes. The ritualist seeks a better rebirth; the Upanishadic sage seeks no rebirth at all. What secures it is no longer the correct act but a liberating knowledge — knowledge of the self, the atman, and of its relation to the ground of all being, brahman. Shankara, the eighth-century systematizer of Advaita, drew the line with great force in his commentary on the Vedanta-Sutras: the ritual portion of the Veda, however meritorious, “cannot lead to final release; for even the most meritorious works necessarily lead to new forms of embodied existence.” Good works buy a better seat on the wheel. Only knowledge gets one off it.

Krishna and Arjuna on the war-chariot at Kurukshetra, the setting of the Bhagavad Gita; Indian painting, 18th–19th century. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What binds, and what the paths are

The mechanism of bondage is karma. Action leaves residues; residues ripen into consequences; consequences require a future in which to ripen; and so the self is carried forward into another birth, and another, the moral weight of each life pressing into the shape of the next. This is reincarnation not as adventure but as predicament — a momentum with no built-in end, driven by desire and the ignorance that mistakes the perishable for the self. Moksha is the breaking of that momentum: the point at which no new karma binds and the accumulated store is exhausted, so that there is no further birth.

What makes the predicament total is that ordinary success cannot touch it. The pious worshipper who meditates correctly, who earns heaven by his merit, does not escape; he is reborn in a higher world and, when the merit runs out, falls again. The Vedic afterlife is itself part of samsara. This is the structural insight the Upanishadic turn forced into the open and that every later school inherited: every reward inside the system is a reward inside the wheel, and so the only liberation worth the name must come from a wholly different order of attainment — knowledge, or grace, or discrimination — and not from a better grade of the same striving. Moksha is defined, in the end, by what it is not: not heaven, not reward, not a further turn however exalted.

How one reaches it is the burden of the Bhagavad Gita, the dialogue set on that stalled chariot, which more than any other text holds together three routes that elsewhere compete. There is jnana-marga, the path of knowledge — discriminating insight into the true self, the way the Upanishads and the later Advaitins prize above all. There is karma-marga, the path of disciplined action — and the Gita’s distinctive move is to argue that action need not bind at all if it is performed without grasping at its fruit. “Your business is with action alone,” Krishna tells the reluctant warrior in Kashinath Telang’s translation of the Gita, “not by any means with fruit. Let not the fruit of action be your motive.” The wise who act in this spirit are “released from the shackles of repeated births.” And there is bhakti-marga, the path of loving devotion to a personal God, which the Gita raises to the summit in its later chapters and which becomes, in the theistic schools, the very substance of release rather than a means to it. The text does not finally rank the three so much as braid them, and its readers have argued ever since about which strand it meant to pull tightest.

The schools divide on what release is

Agreement that moksha is the goal masks a profound disagreement about what, exactly, the liberated state is. Here the Indian schools split along their deepest fault lines, and the split is not a matter of emphasis but of metaphysics.

For Advaita Vedanta, moksha is the realization of something already and eternally the case. The atman was never in fact separate from brahman; the bondage was an error, a misperception sustained by avidya, ignorance, and by maya, the power by which the one appears as the many. Liberation therefore adds nothing and travels nowhere — it is the falling-away of a mistake, the recognition expressed in the great Upanishadic sentence tat tvam asi, “that art thou.” Shankara is blunt about the consequence: for him release means, in Thibaut’s rendering of the commentary, “the absolute merging of the individual soul in Brahman, due to the dismissal of the erroneous notion that the soul is distinct from Brahman.” There is no soul left over to enjoy a heaven, because the soul was never the separate thing it took itself to be.

From this follows Advaita’s most striking claim — jivanmukti, liberation while still alive and embodied. If bondage is only ignorance, then the dawning of true knowledge frees one now; the liberated sage, the jivanmukta, walks and eats and teaches while the body lasts, its remaining momentum spending itself out like a potter’s wheel that keeps turning after the hand is lifted. The verse most often quoted for the indifference of such a one is the saying of King Janaka: “If Mithila is on fire, nothing of mine is burnt in it.” Final, bodiless release — videhamukti — comes only when the body falls, but the essential liberation is a present event, not a posthumous reward.

Adi Shankara expounding to his disciples, after a painting by Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), c. 1904. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The theistic Vedantins rejected this merging with everything that was in them, because to them it dissolved precisely what made release worth having: the loving relation of soul and God. Ramanuja, the eleventh- and twelfth-century master of Vishishtadvaita, “qualified non-dualism,” held that the individual soul is real and distinct, eternally personal — sprung from brahman, never outside it, but never simply identical with it. As Thibaut summarizes the contrast, for Ramanuja release “only means the soul’s passing from the troubles of earthly life into a kind of heaven or paradise where it will remain for ever in undisturbed personal bliss.” The soul attains a likeness to God, even a kind of equality, but it remains a someone, a worshipper, a lover. Madhva, the thirteenth-century founder of Dvaita, “dualism,” pressed the point still harder: God and soul are eternally and irreducibly different, and moksha is communion, the soul’s everlasting nearness to and dependence on the Lord, never a fusion in which the difference is lost. For both, the highest liberation is a relationship; for Shankara, a relationship is exactly what the liberated state no longer contains.

The non-Vedantic dualists draw the picture differently again. Samkhya and its sister discipline of Yoga hold that reality consists of two utterly distinct kinds of thing: purusha, pure witnessing consciousness, and prakriti, unconscious primordial nature out of which the entire psycho-physical world — including the mind, the intellect, and the ego — evolves. Bondage is a case of mistaken identity: consciousness, reflected in the subtle matter of the intellect, takes the body-mind to be itself. Liberation is therefore not union with anything but separation — the term is kaivalya, “isolation,” “aloneness.” The purusha is disentangled from prakriti by discriminative knowledge, and once the watching consciousness sees that it was never the dancer but only the spectator, nature, in the Samkhya image, ceases to dance for it. Because purushas are plural — there are innumerably many witnessing selves — kaivalya is always an individual event; the world keeps unfolding for everyone still bound. It is liberation as radical solitude, the opposite pole from Ramanuja’s heaven of company.

Jain release and the Buddhist exception

Beyond the orthodox six schools the geometry shifts once more, and two neighboring traditions are worth holding distinct: one whose liberation tracks the Hindu shape closely, and one that severs from it at the root.

Jainism is in one sense the most literal of all the liberation traditions. For the Jains, karma is not a metaphor but a fine material substance, an actual subtle matter that flows into the soul and weighs it down, clouding its innate omniscience and luminosity. The whole discipline aims at stopping the inflow and burning off the accumulated mass through austerity, until the soul stands clear. The decisive event is kevala-jnana, “isolated” or absolute knowledge — omniscience, the soul’s infinite knowing restored once the knowledge-obscuring karma is destroyed. When the body finally falls, the purified soul, now a siddha, rises — literally, in Jain cosmology, ascending to the siddhaloka at the very apex of the universe, where the liberated dwell forever in infinite knowledge, perception, bliss, and energy, never to return. The mechanism is unlike anything in Vedanta — there is no brahman to merge with and no God to commune with — but the shape is recognizable: an eternal individual self, freed and ascended.

Statue of Mahavira in meditation at Shri Mahavirji, Rajasthan. — Dayodaya, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Buddhism is the genuine exception, and the difference is not one of vocabulary but of who, if anyone, gets free. The Buddhist goal, nirvana, is also a release from samsara and karma; but it rests on the teaching of anatta, no-self — the denial that there is any permanent atman to be liberated in the first place. Where moksha begins by affirming an eternal self and ends by freeing or merging or isolating it, nirvana is the extinguishing of the very fires of craving that kept the bundle of impermanent processes running, with no abiding subject who survives to enjoy the result. There is release, but no liberated self that is released; the I that sought the goal is precisely what the goal dissolves. The currents of Madhyamaka emptiness sharpen this still further. The Hindu schools and the Buddhists could share almost the entire diagnosis — the wheel, the karma, the ignorance — and part company absolutely on the patient.

Afterlife: the living-liberated and the universal goal

The figure that the tradition handed forward most vividly was the jivanmukta, the one liberated while living — the sage who has nothing left to gain and nothing to fear, for whom Mithila may burn untroubled. The ideal was codified late: the most influential single treatment, the Jivanmuktiviveka (“Discrimination of Liberation-in-Life”), is the work of the fourteenth-century Advaitin Vidyaranya of Sringeri, who folded Yoga-derived disciplines of mind-stilling into a strictly Advaita soteriology — a synthesis the scholar Andrew Fort has called “Yogic Advaita.” The jivanmukta is the proof, internal to the tradition, that release is not merely a destination after death but a condition that can be reached and lived. The widely circulated Vivekachudamani, the “Crest-Jewel of Discrimination” traditionally — though by many modern scholars doubtfully — ascribed to Shankara, made the analysis of liberation-in-life available to centuries of students; the attribution is contested, the influence is not. (See Vivekachudamani.)

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave moksha a second career. The reformers and teachers of neo-Vedanta — Vivekananda foremost among them — lifted release out of its sectarian quarrels and offered it as the secret goal of all religion, the experience toward which every tradition was held to be groping under different names. Advaita, the most monistic and the least tied to any particular God, was well suited to this universalizing, and it became for a global audience the representative Hindu teaching, sometimes at the cost of flattening the very disagreements — Ramanuja’s loving God, Madhva’s eternal difference, Samkhya’s plural and solitary selves — that had given the Indian debate its edge.

That edge is the thing worth keeping. The schools never settled what the loosened soul becomes: a drop returned to the ocean and gone, a beloved forever in the presence of the Lord, a single consciousness standing utterly alone, an omniscient self risen to the roof of the world, or no self at all where the fire goes out. Each answer is a different account of what it would mean, finally, to be free — and the warrior on the chariot was told to act, fruitlessly and without grasping, while the question stayed exactly that open.

→ In the library: Telang, The Bhagavadgītā (Sacred Books of the East VIII, 1882) · Thibaut, The Vedānta-Sūtras with Śaṅkara's Commentary (SBE 34 & 38)

→ Related: Samsara · Karma · Reincarnation · Atman · Brahman · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Bhagavad Gita · Hinduism · Jainism · Nirvana · Anatta · Maya Illusion · Yoga · Upanishads · Vivekachudamani · Proto Samkhya Pre Classical Samkhya · Neo Advaita · Madhyamaka Sunyata · Buddha