4 Paths To Liberation (PART 1)

4 Paths To Liberation (PART 1)

The First Path to Liberation: Knowledge

To attain release, Hinduism acknowledges four distinctive paths: knowledge, devotion, good deeds, and meditation. Hindus do not see these four paths as exclusive one of another. There is a recognition that there are different personalities, and thus different paths. One may pursue one path, and have little to do with the others, or one may hold one path at the center and combine with it one or more of the rest.

The path of study is traditionally centered on the Vedic traditions of Hinduism (the Scriptures). It is the intellectual pursuit, but as such it is not limited to the writings. In tandem with the study of the Vedas, the pursuer of insight must come to know the world; the sciences, history, psychology and more must be studied in order to grasp fully the knowledge contained in the scriptures. The path of knowledge is considered the most difficult of the paths, as it is not simple knowledge alone, but a deeper discrimination of oneness that is required and sought.

Knowledge in Practice: Vedanta

Textbooks list six traditionally recognized Hindu philosophical schools, six approaches to the path of knowledge that claim the Vedas as their basis. The dividing lines between the six systems are 1) the texts that they deemed central to the quest for knowledge;

2) their emphasis on the spectrum from the individual’s practice of yoga to the priestly rituals;

and 3) their assumption about the relationship between the material world and the immaterial “self”. Of the six, three are essentially footnotes to Hinduism’s history. Another focuses exclusively on yoga, and will be considered later in that context.


The fifth is the oldest of the six schools, known as Samkhya. It offers a philosophy of dualism; that is, it assumes that one’s liberation comes through the proper distinction between the two eternal orders: physical and spiritual. Neither is the product of a Creator, and indeed, the spiritual Self cannot influence nor is it influenced by the material world. As the material world changes and evolves, the Self can simply watch silently. Samkhya continues to influence Hindus in large measure because Pajantali absorbed its ideas into the Yoga Sutra, the basis of much of the Yoga school already mentioned.

Vedanta, the sixth philosophical school, is the most influential in modern Hinduism. Its central position is “non-duality,” the idea that there cannot be two realities, physical and spiritual. Sankara, the primary voice of Vedanta tradition, developed his thought based heavily on the principal Upanishads, although he also sought to incorporate the Bhagavad-gita. Sankara insisted that Brahman alone was ultimately real, and the fleeting, ever-changing nature of the universe was evidence that it could not be real. The other great Vedanta thinker, Ramanuja agreed that there could not be two realities, but was not willing to deny the physical universe its reality. He taught instead that the universe was the emanation of Brahman.