Liberation Through Knowledge Alone

For liberation to be achievable by knowledge alone, the problem that liberation solves must itself be a problem of knowledge — not a moral failing, not a ritual impurity, not a separation from God that requires God's grace to bridge, but a cognitive error. Shankara argues precisely this: bondage is ignorance (avidya) — the false identification of the self with what is not the self — and the cure for ignorance is knowledge, just as the cure for the rope-snake illusion is better light and clearer perception. No accumulation of ritual merit, however vast, can cure a cognitive error; no degree of ethical purification, however thorough, can bridge the gap between a false view of oneself and the truth of one's nature. Only the direct recognition of the truth removes the error.

Shankara does not dismiss action, ethics, and devotion as irrelevant to liberation — he assigns them a specific and important role as preparation for knowledge. Just as a student cannot do advanced mathematics without first learning arithmetic, a student cannot receive the non-dual recognition without a mind that has been made calm, focused, and sufficiently dispassionate through years of disciplined practice. Ritual action performed without desire purifies the mind of gross attachments. Ethical practice stabilises the mind and reduces the disturbances of conscience. Devotion focuses the mind on the divine and cultivates a quality of receptive openness. All of these are valuable and often necessary — but they prepare the ground for the liberating recognition without themselves being that recognition.

A further question addressed in the Upadeśasāhasrī is whether the liberating recognition is instantaneous or gradual. Shankara's answer is that the recognition itself is instantaneous — like the sudden seeing of the rope when the illusion of the snake is dispelled — but that its stabilisation in the mind may take time. The moment of recognition is not an experience that fades and must be renewed but a cognitive event that cannot be undone: one cannot return to genuinely believing the rope is a snake after one has clearly seen it is a rope. However, the impressions of the old ignorance (samskaras) may persist for some time as tendencies and habitual reactions, even after the root ignorance has been destroyed. The practice that follows liberation is not the repetition of the liberating recognition but the natural falling away of these residual impressions as they are eroded by continued awareness of what has been recognised.

Shankara's jnana-marga (path of knowledge) as the sole means of liberation was contested by Ramanuja, who argued that knowledge and devotion (bhakti) are co-equal paths and that God's grace is necessary for liberation. The Bhakti movement of the medieval period further challenged the Advaita position by insisting that the relational love between the devotee and the divine is itself the supreme value, not to be dissolved in impersonal non-duality. These debates about jnana, karma, and bhakti remain among the central issues of Hindu philosophical theology.