One of the central problems within Indian tradition that scholars grapple with concerns moksha, often translated often as “spiritual liberation” or “salvation”. Yet to translate moksha as “salvation” is a category mistake: it imports an alien conceptual framework and ultimately results in the loss of understanding of a distinct tradition with its own knowledge quest.
Why is translating moksha as salvation a category mistake? Let us probe more into this question by looking at the concept cluster within which each of the term moves. To begin with, salvation is a religious concept acquiring its meaning from within the domain of religion. It is derived from the Latin word salvatio which means “saved from” or “deliverance from.” Within the semitic religions, it gains the thick meaning of “deliverance from sin.” In Christianity, salvation is a solution to the problem of the separation between Christ/God and the souls of human beings. Human beings are considered fallen and sinful and they need to be saved by Christ/or by transcendental, personal God. The problem is cast in the domain of morality, addressing moral corruption due to disobedience and consequent separation from God.
However, despite the sins committed by humankind, Christ is merciful enough to save human beings if they practice faith and obedience in accordance with God’s commands. The divine is active. God acts – he judges, forgives the wrongdoings of humankind and redeems them. Through prayer, obedience, participation in religious sacraments, aligning one’s will with that of God’s commandments, the soul/self is preserved and reconciled with God in eternal bliss, with the right relationship restored. Guilt, conscience, sin, God’s mercy, redemption, salvation are the cluster concepts.
However, when we examine how moksha is discussed within Indian tradition, we find that unlike salvation, moksha moves within a very different concept cluster. It is an epistemic concept (the Sanskrit root is muc which means let go, free) and moves within an epistemic framework and not a religious framework. We get moksha when our avidya or ignorance is lifted. Hence, moksha/freedom is a result of a cognitive realization unlike in salvation where freedom happens when sin is forgiven. The obstacle here is avidya or ignorance and not a moral failing like sin. Since the problem is framed in terms of knowledge-epistemic terms and not in terms of a moral failing, no saviour or divine intervention is required. Even when there is divine intervention, it is not due to sin but more to address misrecognition, attachment, and bondage—and not guilt or transgression in a juridical sense.
The words used with moksha are self-enquiry, meditation, contemplation, jnana, avidya, Viveka. In moksha, we are being freed from a cognitive illusion, or ignorance (false identification with body /mind/self). It requires us to deal with questions like: How to live well? What is the self? How to get freedom from samsara? What is the nature of reality/existence? It is ignorance and wrong-seeing that is addressed and not moral corruption. Freedom is not granted but instead involves a knowledge and learning effort towards the removal of error. In short, moksha involves a discovery. No external saviour, no judgement, no divine forgiveness, only the correct seeing of reality liberates us. It requires right knowledge and intellectual discernment (Viveka). And unlike in salvation where the self is redeemed, in moksha, the self is dissolved by understanding the nature of self and the world. In moksha, the divine could be impersonal (brahman or not central as in Buddhism). You don’t need necessarily need a relationship with a deity in moksha (though this is not excluded as a way) but what you do need is an insight about the nature of the world.
In short, by now it must be clear that moksha belongs to the domain of knowledge. We find that knowledge, freedom and self are understood very differently in the two schemes given above. Therefore, when we translate moksha as salvation, we shift the whole conceptual field by importing an alien grammar and moksha sits uneasily with salvation. We end up moralizing what is actually an epistemological issue and the loss is nothing less than loss of access to our own traditions and its thoughts.