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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
The Systems of Rămapuja ....
535
this be objected to on the ground that Release, if brought about by injunctions, must therefore be something non-eternal; for what is effected is not Release itself, but only the cessation of what impedes it. Moreover, the injunction does not directly produce the cessation of Bondage, but only through the meditation of direct cognition of Brahman as consisting of pure knowledge, and not connected with a world. It is this knowledge which the injunction produces."1 Thus, bondage is only imaginary and it has no permanent existence. Release or liberation is eternal because it is nothing but the free nature of the Self and it is co-existent with the Self or Brahman. The sense of the unhindered freedom of the Supreme Self is lost or obscured by ignorance due to false identification of the soul with the modes of the body including ahamkāra. When that sense of separativeness is successfully overcome by meditating upon the real nature of the Brahman or is'vara, the soul loses all its worldly pains and sufferings. It realises its real nature as pure and perfectly blissful. This experience constitutes the state of liberation.
Rāmānuja further makes it clear that release is eternal; hence, it cannot be produced and it cannot be effected by meritorious acts. Bondage is essentially an illusory phenomenon; nescience (avidyā) cannot exist anywhere but in the thinking mind and hence it has to be uprooted by the right knowledge
Ramānuja – Com. on Vedanta Sutras. Tr. Thibaut, 1.1.4, p. 188.
? Ibid. 1•1•4, p. 181.
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