Moksha: liberation from rebirth

Hindus affirm moksha, release from the cycle of birth and death, as the highest goal of human life. It is freedom from samsara and from the ignorance (avidya) and desire that bind the soul to it, and its attainment is described very differently across the major Vedanta schools. Shankara's Advaita Vedanta holds it to be the realization that the individual self (atman) is not merely close to but strictly identical with the ultimate reality (Brahman), a knowledge that dissolves, rather than fulfills, the sense of being a separate person. Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, rejects that full identity, holding that the liberated soul remains eternally distinct even while existing in the closest possible loving relation to God. Madhva's Dvaita goes further still, teaching a strict and permanent duality in which soul and God are never identical even in liberation, only ever united in devoted relationship. These are rival philosophical positions within Hindu tradition, not variant popular customs, and Vedanta commentators have argued the differences with real intellectual seriousness across many centuries.

A further distinction, common to several schools, separates jivanmukti, liberation attained while still embodied and alive, from videhamukti, final liberation only at the moment of bodily death, with sages said to be jivanmukta continuing to act in the world while no longer bound by the karma their actions would otherwise generate.

Hindu thought recognizes several paths (margas or yogas) toward moksha, the way of knowledge, of devotion, of disciplined action, of meditation, with the Bhagavad Gita presenting them as complementary routes suited to different temperaments rather than competing methods, though later teachers and lineages have often emphasized one path as superior or as the natural completion of the others. Moksha is the fourth and crowning aim of life (purushartha), transcending dharma, artha, and kama, the three worldly goals of duty, prosperity, and pleasure that occupy the earlier stages of a well-ordered life in classical Hindu ethical thought.

The schools differ, beyond the metaphysics of Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and Dvaita, over whether liberation is normally realized within this very life or only after death, and over whether it means the extinguishing of individual identity into the absolute or an eternal, conscious relationship with a personal God who is loved and worshipped forever. Devotional (bhakti) movements, historically influential across many regions of India from roughly the medieval period onward, tend to favor the relational, Vaishnava-inflected picture of eternal loving union over the more austere Advaita image of dissolution, and this tension between moksha as union and moksha as merger remains a live and unresolved question within Hindu philosophy and practice rather than a settled doctrine all schools share.