Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals, and Make-Believe in the Moksopaya (Yogavasistha)

In the Mok?opaya (also known as the Yogavasi??ha), an eleventh-century Sanskrit poetic text, the great Vedic philosopher Vasi??ha counsels his young protégé Lord Rama about the ways of the world through sixty-four stories designed to bring Rama from ignorance to wisdom. Much beloved, this work reflects the philosophy of Kashmir Saivism. Precisely because all worldly pursuits are dreamlike and fiction-like, the human soul must first come to an experience of non-dualistic, mind-only metaphysics, and after attaining this wisdom, promote moral activism. Engaged Emancipation is a wide-ranging consideration of this work and the philosophical and spiritual questions it addresses by philosophers, Sanskritists, and scholars of religion, literature, and science. Contributors allow readers to walk with Rama as his melancholy and angst transform into connectivity, peace, and spiritual equipoise.