Mokṣa (मोक्ष)
Mokṣa is freedom in the largest sense the Gita uses: not relief from a particular trouble but release from the whole recurring machinery of embodiment, craving, and rebirth. Chapter 5 titles itself around it, and BG 5.28 describes the liberated sage as “forever free” (sadā mukta). Chapter 2 already names the mechanism — BG 2.51: the wise, having abandoned the fruit of action, are “freed from the bondage of birth” and reach the region “beyond all ill.”
What one is freed from
The Gita is consistent that the bondage is internal. BG 5.3 calls the person free who neither hates nor craves and so is “easily liberated from bondage”; BG 16.5 sets the “divine endowment” toward liberation and the “demonic” toward bondage, the difference being disposition, not circumstance. The last chapter makes the strongest offer in the text: BG 18.66 — abandon every dharma, take refuge in Me alone, “I shall free you from all sins; do not grieve.”
Related
- Brahman (ब्रह्मन्) — the Gita’s positive name for the liberated condition is brahmabhūta / brahma-nirvāṇa; mokṣa is the same thing named as a release rather than an attainment
- Sannyāsa (संन्यास) — chapter 18’s title is Mokṣa-Sannyāsa-Yoga; renunciation, rightly understood as inner non-doership, is the chapter’s route to it
- Tyāga (त्याग) — relinquishing the fruit of action is the practicable form the whole approach to mokṣa takes for someone who must still act
Verses that reference this
Freed from passion, fear and anger, filled with Me, taking refuge in Me, purified in the fire of wisdom, many have entered into My Being.
Thinking on That, merged in That, established in That, solely devoted to That, they go whence there is no return, their sins dispelled by wisdom.
He who is happy within, who rejoiceth within, who is illuminated within, that Yogî, becoming the Eternal, goeth to the Peace of the Eternal.
Rishis, their sins destroyed, their duality removed, their selves controlled, intent upon the welfare of all beings, obtain the Peace of the Eternal.
The Peace of the Eternal lies near to those who know themselves, who are disjoined from desire and passion, subdued in nature, of subdued thoughts.
There he recovereth the characteristics belonging to this former body, and with these he again laboureth for perfection, O joy of the Kurus.
I will again proclaim that supreme Wisdom, of all wisdom the best, which having known, all the Sages have gone hence to the supreme Perfection.
Having taken refuge in this Wisdom and being assimilated to My own nature, they are not re-born even in the emanation of a universe, nor are disquieted in the dissolution.
For I am the abode of the Eternal, and of the indestructible nectar of immortality, of immemorial righteousness, and of unending bliss.
Nor here may be acquired knowledge of its form, nor its end, nor its origin, nor its rooting-place; this strongly rooted Asvattha having been cut down by the unswerving weapon of non-attachment,
Nor doth the sun lighten there, nor moon, nor fire; having gone thither they return not; that is My supreme abode.