History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c96.s1.44

v7.c96.s1.44

The 4th Puruṣārtha Mokṣa can be obtained only by a few. It is not a bow which every man or any man can make strung. It was a very difficult path like a razor's edge (Kaṭha Up III 14), far more difficult than the path of devotion to a Personal God (Bhagavadgītā XII. 5) The Upaniṣadic doctrine of liberation comes to this that man's nature is really divine, that it is possible for a human being to know and become actually identified with the Godhead, that this should be the ultimate goal of man's life, that this can be achieved by one's own efforts, but the way to achieve this goal is most difficult and requires the aspirant to give up egotism, selfishness and worldly attachments. Besides, there is another difficulty. The conceptions about mokṣa differ in the different schools of thought like Nyāya Sāṅkhya, Vedānta. Even in the Vedānta the conception about Mokṣa on the part of the different ācāryas differs. Some declared that there were four stages in Mukti viz. *Sālokya* (place in Lord's world), *Sāmīpya* (proximity), *Sārūpya* (attaining same form as God) and *Sāyujya* (absorption).²⁶¹⁶ These matters cannot be gone into here.