Liberation Comes Through Knowledge Rather Than Works or Devotion

Advaita Vedanta holds that liberation, moksha, comes through jnana, a direct and discriminating knowledge of the self as identical with Brahman, and that neither ritual action nor devotional practice can themselves deliver that liberation, however valuable each may be in preparing a person to receive the knowledge when it comes. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III explains that the school's reasoning follows from its diagnosis of bondage itself as a form of ignorance, avidya, a mistaken perception that takes the self to be limited, embodied and distinct from Brahman, so that what ends bondage cannot logically be an action, since action produces new results and cannot itself remove a misperception, but only a correction of the perception, which is what knowledge specifically does and nothing else can substitute for. An Introduction to Hinduism records that this is why the school treats ritual worship and devotional practice as belonging to a genuinely preparatory stage, purifying and stilling the mind so that the discriminating knowledge can eventually arise in it, rather than dismissing them as worthless, but the school is emphatic that the knowledge itself, once it arises, is what actually liberates, not the practices that made a person ready to receive it.

Samkhya reaches a strikingly similar conclusion, that liberation comes through knowledge rather than through ritual action or devotion, while starting from a metaphysics that Advaita would reject outright, since Samkhya holds purusha, pure consciousness, and prakriti, the material principle from which the entire observable world unfolds, to be two genuinely distinct and irreducible realities rather than treating the world as ultimately identical with a single undivided Brahman. Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and Meaning explains that on this account bondage consists in purusha's mistaken identification with the workings of prakriti, mistaking the activities of mind and body for its own nature, and liberation, kaivalya, comes when discriminating knowledge, viveka, correctly distinguishes the two and purusha recognizes itself as never having truly been entangled at all. The Encyclopedia of Hinduism notes that despite this sharply different metaphysical starting point, Samkhya's insistence that only discriminating knowledge, not ritual, devotion or moral effort as such, actually accomplishes liberation runs parallel to Advaita's own claim closely enough that the two schools are regularly read alongside one another on this specific point, two systems that disagree about what ultimately exists agreeing all the same about what liberates a person from bondage to it.