Living without your Mind: The Mokṣopāya’s Vision of Liberation

This paper examines the distinctive conception of liberation in life (jīvanmukti) as the destruction of the mind (manonāśa) found in the Mokṣopāya or The Way to Liberation, a 10th-century epic that narrates the instruction of Rāma by Vasiṣṭha. Through analysis of both didactic passages and the narrative of Līlā, it demonstrates how the text contains an idealist metaphysics that not only reduces the external world to mental function, but reduces mind itself to pure consciousness. This latter reduction differentiates the Mokṣopāya from Buddhist vijñānavāda, Advaita Vedānta and non-dual Śaivism, since the ‘unreality’ of the mind in the Mokṣopāya is constituted by the fact that it arises without determinate causation or a guiding self. The paper argues that “destruction of mind” refers not to cessation of mental activity but to recognizing the mind's spontaneity and selflessness — a perspective offering unique advantages over alternative models of liberation within Indian philosophical traditions.