The Philosophy of the Upanishads c12.s2.t4.3

c12.s2.t4.3

This is the origin of the empirical and therefore mistaken view that deliverance (which actually subsisted from the very beginning, and in the very instant of recognition becomes ours perfectly and consciously) is first attained fully with the dissolution of the body. “To him shall I enter in when I depart hence”;¹ “to this (worldly sphere) shall I belong only until I am delivered; then shall I go home”;² “and when he has been delivered from the body (or, after that he has been delivered through knowledge), then (first ultimately in death) is he delivered,” *vimuktas' c'a vimuc'yate*.³ The comparison (of life) to the potter's wheel which ceases turning when the vessel (deliverance) is finished belongs to a later period,⁴ like the distinction between those who are first delivered in the hour of death (*videhamukti*), and those who are already delivered during their life-time (*jîvanmukti*). This distinction and the above comparison have their origin primarily from the realistic age of the Vedânta that finds itself drifting towards the Sânkhya. Neither of them meet us in the Upanishads (with quite late exceptions), and are opposed to the original meaning of the doctrine of emancipation. According to it, every man, as soon as he is in possession of the knowledge of the âtman, is *jîvanmukta*. The continuance or cessation of his bodily existence is to him, as everything else in the world, a matter of indifference. He gains nothing by death of which he was not in possession already beforehand, and is released from nothing from which he had not been already released previously by knowledge.