This session highlights current doctoral research in Hindu philosophy. In accord with this year’s AAR theme of “freedom,” each of the three papers offers new insights into the different ways in which liberation (mokṣa) was understood in premodern South Asia. The first paper draws attention to the relatively understudied Pāśupata system, focusing on the early commentator Kauṇḍinya’s understanding of liberation not just as freedom from suffering but as attainment of “sovereignty” (aiśvarya). Both of the other two papers focus on the Mokṣopāya/Yogavāsiṣṭha, offering a close reading of the story of Līlā, a queen who comes to learn that time and space are not as they appear. The first of these two papers explores the meaning of the term cidākāśa, or “the space of consciousness,” while the other offers a novel interpretation of the term manonāśa, or the “destruction of the mind.”
Scholars have framed liberation (mokṣa) in terms of negative freedom, or the cessation of suffering from worldly entanglements. Pāśupata Śaivism has been similarly understood through duḥkhānta (cessation of suffering). However, this paper argues that Kauṇḍinya’s soteriology is more complex, incorporating aiśvarya (sovereignty) alongside duḥkhānta, thus introducing a dimension of positive freedom. While negative freedom (duḥkhānta) aligns with renunciatory traditions, positive freedom (aiśvarya) suggests an active exercise of divine will. Kauṇḍinya suggests that liberation from bondage (pāśa) is not merely a means to ending suffering but also leads to the attainment of absolute sovereignty—a state in which the practitioner acquires divine agency (śivatva) and unites with Śiva (sāyujya). By analyzing Kauṇḍinya’s use of aiśvarya, śivatva, and sāyujya, this paper examines the tension in Pāśupata thought, challenging standard ascetic interpretations and offering new insights into early Śaiva conceptualizations of liberation and agency.
Freedom in the philosophies of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions is often thought to result from the cultivation of a liberating knowledge. This freedom is often negatively defined as release from suffering and samsara. Some traditions however additionally posit a freedom from the constraints of space and time as well, leading to extraordinary claims about the acquisition of supernatural states of existence. My paper explores one such occurrence of this theme within a philosophical narrative belonging to the Sanskrit work, the Mokṣopāya/ Yogavāśiṣṭha. The famous “Story of Līlā” discusses the freedom of movement between multiple worlds through its notion of an absolute “space of consciousness” (cidākāśa). The primary objective of this paper is to philosophically analyze this notion of cidākāśa through Vedāntic positions about space, externality, and ephemerality. Through this analysis, I highlight a dialectical tension latent within the Mokṣopāya’s spatial metaphysics, and propose solutions to this conceptual instability.
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.