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

The Mokṣopāya (MU) or The Way to Liberation is a 10th-century Sanskrit philosophical epic from Kashmir that narrates an extended dialogue between a young Rāma and his teacher Vasiṣṭha, in which the latter instructs the former regarding liberation in life (jīvanmukti) through both philosophical instruction and complex narratives. Building on three years of PhD research into this understudied text, this paper will explicate the MU’s vision of liberation by examining how both didactic and narrative portions of the text work together to present a unique vision of liberation in life (jīvanmukti) as the destruction of the mind (manonāśa). Specifically, I demonstrate (1) how, because of the MU’s distinctive philosophy of mind, this conception of liberation differs from those found in idealistic Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta, and non-dual Śaivism, and (2) how this vision helps resolve a central philosophical challenge of the MU: how one can remain engaged with the world as an individual self, using one’s mind, after realizing that it is not ultimately real.

An ongoing philological research project has confirmed that the Kashmiri Mokṣopāya is the earliest available version of a text commonly known across India as the Yogavāsiṣṭha (Slaje 1994, Hanneder 2006) and has produced a critical edition that makes this text available for further philosophical analysis. Although prior studies have highlighted the MU’s unique philosophy (Hanneder 2006, Chenet 2015), the precise nature of its idealism and its divergence from influential contemporaneous alternatives remains underexplored. Furthermore, while recent scholarship has sought to rehabilitate the philosophical significance of the MU’s stories (Lo Turco 2005), it has not yet been shown how the MU’s complex narrative structures themselves convey its philosophical message. This paper addresses these gaps by translating and analysing key passages from the story of Līlā, the longest and first major sub-narrative in the text, to show how both explicit and implicit philosophy work in unison to illuminate the MU's vision of liberation as the destruction of the mind.

Although the MU provides detailed descriptions of the liberated being and the stages on the path to awakening, further philosophical investigation is required to resolve a core paradox. As noted by Hanneder, the MU often defines the liberated being as without a mind, yet also as possessing a ‘pure’ (sattva) mind, implying that the non-existence of the mind does not prohibit its function in the world (Hanneder 2006, 218). This paradox is linked to a larger tension in the MU: the phenomenal world and the mind are said to be unreal (with pure consciousness as the only reality), yet both necessarily appear wherever there is consciousness. In order, then, to fully comprehend the MU’s vision of liberation, a closer examination of what the mind’s ‘non-existence’ means in the MU is required. 

To address this, the paper proceeds as follows. After introducing the text’s narrative framing, structure, and historical context, I briefly examine certain MU verses that cite the literary theorist Ānandavardhana. These indicate that the author of the MU sought to teach about the nature of liberation implicitly through narrative as much as he did through explicit instruction. This sets the stage for my analysis of the MU’s conception of the mind as illusion, explored in three parts through the story of Līlā.

The first section examines passages from the opening of the Līlā story, demonstrating how the MU’s idealistic philosophy involves a twofold ontological reductionism: (1) a reduction of the apparent external world to a function of the individual mind (citta/manas), and (2) a reduction of the mind itself to a function of pure consciousness (cit). While the first reduction employs arguments common to other idealist schools in 10th-century Kashmir (c.f. Ratié 2009), the second reduction highlights the MU’s distinct philosophical position.

The next two sections of my investigation examine this reduction. Section two concentrates on the central events of the Līlā narrative, revealing how both its philosophical dialogues and pivotal events substantiate the unreality of the mind by emphasizing its nature as spontaneously arising. The MU argues that while many mental appearances result from previous memories, many others arise coincidentally (kākatālīyavat). This position stands in contrast to Dharmakīrtian vijñānavāda Buddhism (which the MU was familiar with), which maintains that mental appearances emerge from a beginningless causal chain between cognitions (jñapti) and latent impressions (vāsanā). It also, as I will argue, differentiates the MU from the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara, Maṇḍaṇa and Gauḍapāda, for whom the illusory of appearance of the world arises out of a similar process of cause and effect. 

The third section examines the final events of Līlā’s story, which illustrate another aspect of the MU’s claim regarding the mind’s unreality: its intrinsic selflessness. The final sequences of the story undermine the reality of the self by depicting a world in which a dream character or a mental representation of a person is as real as the self that produces it. Thus the MU’s philosophy of mind differs from contemporary forms of non-dual Śaivism — as expressed in the writings of Somānanda and Utpaladeva — by denying both the ultimacy of either an individual or cosmic self, as well as the ultimate role of desire (icchā) in the creation of the world. 

The conclusion of the paper synthesizes the MU’s idealistic vision to answer the question of what liberation entails in this text. I argue that what is described as the ‘destruction’ of the mind should be understood not as a literal cessation of mental activity, but as the realization that the mind is fundamentally spontaneous and selfless—the two key characteristics that define its ‘unreality’ in the MU. Finally, I briefly reflect on the possible advantages of this vision of liberation over alternative models and consider how it might be situated within contemporary philosophical discussions on the nature of mind and consciousness.