⁂ Concepts · Life · No. 168
Mokṣa

A wheel that keeps turning after the hand is removed.

Mokṣa

Release from the round of rebirth and from what binds one to it - the final aim of the Hindu, Jain and Yogic traditions.

Theme
Life, death and meaning
Tradition
Indian
Term
मोक्ष · mokṣa
Term fixed
c. 800

In plain terms

If rebirth is the problem, liberation is the answer - and the traditions divide sharply on what it is.

For Advaita it is not an achievement at all. Nothing is attained and nowhere is reached; what happens is the removal of an error about who you are, and the self was always already what it turns out to be. Liberation is therefore possible while alive, and the liberated person continues to eat and walk about.

For Sāṃkhya it is the isolation of the witnessing self from all mental and material activity. For Viśiṣṭādvaita and the devotional schools it is eternal communion with a personal God, with the individual self retained. For Jainism it is the soul, cleared of karmic matter, rising to the top of the universe.

Same word, and four incompatible destinations.

As a philosopher would put it

Mokṣa is the puruṣārtha that supersedes the other three, and the schools' accounts of it follow directly from their metaphysics.

Advaita's account is knowledge-based: bondage is avidyā, ignorance of the identity of ātman and Brahman, so liberation is jñāna and nothing else - not action, which produces results within saṃsāra, and not devotion, which is preparatory. Jīvanmukti, liberation while embodied, follows: the error is removed and the body's remaining momentum plays out.

Sāṃkhya-Yoga makes it kaivalya, the isolation of puruṣa from prakṛti, achieved through discriminative discernment. Rāmānuja rejects the identity claim and makes liberation communion with a personal Brahman in which the self persists as a distinct part. Madhva keeps the difference permanent and admits a hierarchy among the liberated.

Jainism's mokṣa is the removal of karmic matter, after which the jīva rises to the siddhaśilā at the universe's summit, omniscient and permanently at rest.

Where you meet it

The Advaita tradition maintains a category most religious systems have no room for: the person who is liberated and still alive.

A jīvanmukta has, on the tradition's account, realised the identity of self and Brahman, and remains embodied because the karma that produced this body is already in motion - the standard image is a potter's wheel that continues turning after the potter's hand is removed.

What follows is a set of practical questions the tradition treats seriously. Does such a person still need to observe ritual obligations? Can they still err? Śaṅkara's position and those of his commentators differ, and the debates are extensive.

The existence of the category is the philosophically interesting part. If liberation were a destination reached after death, the question could not arise. Because Advaita makes it the correction of an error, it must be available now - which means the tradition has to describe what a liberated person's ordinary Tuesday looks like, and it does.

What is actually disputed

Whether liberation is knowledge or relationship.

Advaita's claim that mokṣa is achieved by knowledge alone follows from its diagnosis: if bondage is a misapprehension, only its correction removes it, and action cannot. Rāmānuja's objection is that a Brahman with no qualities cannot be known, loved or related to, and that a liberation in which the individual disappears is indistinguishable from annihilation - so devotion and a persisting self must both be retained.

Madhva goes further and keeps the difference eternal.

The Buddhist criticism cuts underneath all three: if there is no self, then nothing is liberated, and the whole framework of a bound self seeking release rests on the error the analysis was meant to remove. The three-way Vedānta dispute and the Buddhist objection to all of it have run for more than a thousand years and are not converging.

Defined against

  • Saṃsāra The round and release from it are defined entirely against each other

Philosophers

  • Shankara Liberation as the removal of an error, available while alive
  • Ramanujacharya Liberation as communion with a personal God, the self retained
  • Kapila Kaivalya, the isolation of the witness
  • Mahavira Liberation as the removal of karmic matter
  • Yajnavalkya The Upaniṣadic sources the schools all read

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Saṃsāra c. 700 BC · Nirvāṇa c. 450 BC · Ātman c. 700 BC · Brahman c. 800 · Ignorance c. 450 BC

Mokṣa is the fourth and highest of the four aims of life, alongside dharma, artha and kāma; the schools agree that it is the goal and disagree almost entirely about what it consists in.