Spiritual expressions, for how loosely they’re thrown around, often suffer little losses in their intended meaning. There are as many interpretations of the term maya as there are its users. Some employ it to mean frank illusion; some use it to refer to things around us “the way they are”; yet others imply a naïve ignorance of life’s profound truths. Yet somehow, the import manages to get through to the other side, unscathed and undiluted. It’s a similar scenario with the concept of spiritual liberation. You and I can have very different notions about liberation, a common contention being what it is that one must really be liberated from. Yet, we know what to expect and are able to reach a common ground of sorts every time we discuss spiritual liberation, despite any differences of culture, persuasion, or mental or emotional discernment between us.
However, such unspoken agreements on the mental plane do little to reconcile the several divergences that exist in theory. In some of my own work, for example, I’ve used the Hindu term mukti to refer to a paradigm of liberation which, unlike much of mainstream Hinduism, has nothing to do with soul, rebirth, or God. Yet other codified faiths differ significantly in their tenets of spiritual liberation. The question that arises here is, can a common ground be reached on the theoretical plane, too? Further, can any real or imagined faith ever dispense with the notion of liberation altogether and propose an alternative spiritual goalpost?
“What is liberation at bottom?”, we ask. What characterises every possible thing that one can ever wish to be freed from? Swami Vivekananda identifies vedanta as ‘freedom’, but freedom from what? Needless to say, anything from which liberation is sought cannot but entail pain. And this is the universal clause encompassing every interpretation of liberation—whatever it is that man seeks liberation from, it must be where he senses pain and suffering. Nothing else is universal, least of all being the source of suffering. It won’t, in fact, be amiss to contend that desires are the most multitudinous entities in existence. And the necessary ramification is that suffering is equally multitudinous. People from divergent backgrounds can have very different views about life’s biggest suffering. Remove globalisation from the picture and discourage any major intercourse of ideas and perspectives—the invariable result is an array of different faiths, each offering to liberate man from what they believe most conduces to suffering.
What this also entails is that no faith can ever truly distance itself from the concept of liberation, since in that case, it shall no longer remain a redeemer of human suffering. No faith can ever disclaim the goal of addressing human suffering, for if it did so, it would virtually cease to be a faith. Some, like the Buddha, went so far with this as to steer clear of all metaphysical speculation. As Huston Smith paraphrases a popular Buddhist parable in his book The World’s Religions: “…it is not on the view that the world is eternal, that it is finite, that body and soul are distinct, or that the Buddha exists after death, that a religious life depends. Whether these views or their opposites are held, there is still rebirth, there is old age, there is death, and grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair…. I have not spoken to these views because they do not conduce to absence of passion, or to tranquillity and Nirvana.” The Buddha’s import is readily amenable to empirical validation. Across faiths, the idea of spiritual liberation remains strongly wedded to metaphysical doctrines, be it a personified God or the formless Brahmin, whose supposed veracity provides the basis for erecting their edifices of liberation. The truth, however, is that any such metaphysical doctrine is neither necessary nor sufficient for attaining liberation, and can only be of adjunctive value. It is nothing but an overriding desire to be freed of suffering that alone paves the way for liberation.
Varied faiths can have varied spiritual goalposts, but liberation must be the essential purport of each one of them, whether explicit or tacit. And seen carefully, the topic of suffering is the fount of all philosophy. Faith, therefore, diverges from philosophy when it repudiates liberation altogether. As happiness is the only true touchstone of human success, how far it helps relieve suffering is the ultimate yardstick for judging a faith or philosophy. Another corollary is that faith always identifies itself with philosophy. Philosophy, on the contrary, need not be about faith.