Is Liberation (moksa) Pleasant?

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore, the prophetic poet of India, remarked that most of us worldly ordinary people are slaves. We are enslaved our petty belongings, our small individual prides, and even our subordinates. For a being so profoundly in love with bondage the message of freedom is quite without appeal, if not positively fearsome. It is not that we are quite insensitive the sorry sides of human life. But, for all those long stretches of worried waiting and bitter aftertaste, deadly boredom, and the terrible chill of loneliness-we are still not ready forgo the often brief but intense pleasures that this worldly existence undoubtedly allows us enjoy. Isn't it foolish, the hedonist Carvaka argues, to give up eating rice simply because the grains come enfolded with husk? Since we love our little terrestrial joys so acutely that for their sake we are even prepared fall upon the thorns of life and bleed, now and then we find the notion of a liberated state of the soul-with all its promised painlessness-an out-and-out negative one. This attitude of the man in the street towards moksa or complete liberation is counted as one among many of his false cognitions. In his commentary on Gautama's Nyaya Sutras (1.1.2) Vatsyayana gives this very faithful account of our mundane reasons for recoiling from the philosophically glorified prospect of getting rid of the sorrowful cycle of birth and death that is generally called samsira in Indian philosophy.