Engaged Emancipation: Mind Morals and Make–Believe in the Moksopaya (Yogavasistha)

A wide-ranging analysis of the Moksopaya, the Indian literary classic that teaches through storytelling how to enjoy an active, successful, worldly life in a spiritually enlightened way. In the Moksopaya (also known as the Yogavasistha), an eleventh-century Sanskrit poetic text, the great Vedic philosopher Vasi ha counsels his young protégé Lord Rama about the ways of the world through sixty-four stories designed to bring Rama from ignorance to wisdom. Much beloved, this work reflects the philosophy of Kashmir Saivism. Precisely because all worldly pursuits are dreamlike and fiction-like, the human soul must first come to an experience of non-dualistic, mind-only metaphysics, and after attaining this wisdom, promote moral activism. Engaged Emancipation is a wide-ranging consideration of this work and the philosophical and spiritual questions it addresses by philosophers, Sanskritists, and scholars of religion, literature, and science. Contributors allow readers to walk with Rama as his melancholy and angst transform into connectivity, peace, and spiritual equipoise.

CHRISTOPHER KEY CHAPPLE is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author or editor of many books, including Yoga and the Luminous: Pataiijali's Spiritual Path to Freedom and Reconciling Yoga: Haribhadra's Collection of View on Yoga, both also published by SUNY Press.

ARINDAM CHAKRABARTI is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. His books include Mahabharata Now: Narration, Aesthetics, Ethics (coedited with Sibaji Bandyopadhyaya).