Moksha

Liberation — recognition of one’s true nature as atman/brahman; the goal of the Gita.

Overview

Moksha is the state of real, permanent happiness and complete freedom from suffering. Every religion and tradition promises something like it under different names — nirvana, salvation, liberation — but the underlying claim is uniform: there exists a state in which suffering is permanently overcome.

The Bhagavad Gita is called a moksha shastra, a scripture dealing with moksha. Swami Sarvapriyananda stresses that this frames everything else in the book. The Gita is not a manual for worldly success, career, diet, exercise, stress management, or even conventional religion. It talks about those things incidentally, but its subject is moksha.

In the Vedantic framework, the four aims of life (see purushartha) are dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. The first three are pursued in the world and never yield lasting happiness. Moksha is the aim that does — and according to Vedanta, it is attained not outside but within, as recognition of one’s true nature as atman / brahman.

Mechanism — jnana, not action. Moksha is not produced. It is recognition. Ignorance of one’s true nature is the root of samsara; jnana — direct knowledge — is its direct and sufficient cause. No amount of karma, ritual, or outer adjustment produces it. The path that culminates in it is jnana-yoga, informed by viveka. In Advaita’s compression: brahma satyam jagat mithya, jivo brahmaiva naparah — and moksha is the living of that recognition.

Jivanmukti — liberation now. Verse 02-15 — so ‘mritatvaya kalpate, “fit for immortality” — does not refer to a posthumous state. Swami reads it as jivanmukti: freedom realized now, in this life, while the body continues. The body plays out its remaining karma, but the one who knows I am not this body is already free.

What moksha is not. It is not attaining a new place, acquiring a new power, or becoming someone else. The atman was never bound; only the apparent jiva took itself to be bound. Moksha is the correction of that mistake.

Related concepts

• Fourth of the purushartha; transcends dharma, artha, and kama
• Release from samsara; reversal of ajnana
• Attained by recognizing atman / brahman; direct cause is jnana
• Paths: jnana-yoga, karma-yoga (bhakti and raja yoga also discussed in the Gita)
• Realized alive: jivanmukta
• Studied through vedanta

In the Gita

• 02-11-12: the wise grieve not; atman never was not.
• 02-15: fit for immortality — jivanmukti.
• 02-16: philosophical heart — tat tvam asi.

Lecture evidence

• Ep. 1 [03:50]: Gita is a moksha shastra — a scripture about liberation.
• Ep. 1 [06:56]: Moksha is the state of permanent happiness and end of suffering; every religion names it differently.
• Ep. 1 [08:02]: Krishna in the Gita is teaching moksha, not worldly religion.
• Ep. 4 [66:04]: Amritatvaya kalpate — “fit for immortality” — read as jivanmukti, freedom now.