Moksha (मोक्ष) is the fourth of the purusharthas and is called param-purushartha, the highest aim. Where dharma orders life, artha sustains it, and kama enriches it, alone takes one beyond the bounded round of life altogether.
Why It Is Called Highest
The other three purusharthas yield real but limited fruit. Dharma generates punya, but punya itself is exhausted in time. Artha procures security, but no security is permanent. Kama delights, but no delight is endless. alone is described as nityam (eternal), anantam (without end), param (highest). It is the liberation of the self from the very cycle in which the other three play out.
Continuous, Not Opposed
A common misreading sets against the other three — as if pursuing liberation required despising dharma, artha, and kama. The classical view is more integrated. Dharma trains the heart; artha frees one from immediate want; kama satisfies and matures desire; the rightly lived life becomes ripe for the question that answers — who am I, really?
The Mood of
A shift accompanies the turn toward : the rise of vairagya (वैराग्य), dispassion. is not aversion or depression; it is the natural slackening of grasp that comes when one has tasted enough and understood that no finite object can finally fulfil. The Vivekachudamani describes as the disgust toward sense-objects that arises from seeing their fleeting nature.
Three Paths
The Bhagavad Gita names three principal paths to . Jnana yoga approaches through discrimination (viveka) between self and not-self. Bhakti yoga approaches through loving surrender to the Lord. Karma yoga approaches through selfless action offered as worship. Patanjali's Raja yoga — the eight limbs — provides a methodical psychological discipline that supports all three.
in the Ashramas
The ashrama scheme reflects the deepening orientation to . The student prepares; the householder enacts; the forest dweller withdraws; the renunciate stands free. But the tradition is clear that one need not formally take sannyasa to seek liberation. A householder may be inwardly free; a renunciate outwardly austere yet inwardly bound. The decisive shift is interior.
What Is Not
is not annihilation. It is not absorption into nothingness. It is not the loss of love. It is, on every classical account, the fullness of being — sat-chit-ananda — recognised as one's true nature, or alternatively as eternal communion with the Lord. The negations of point not at emptiness but at the falling away of what veiled an inexhaustible presence.
The Aim That Aims the Others
When is held as the final aim, dharma, artha, and kama find their right scale. They are taken seriously because life is real; they are not clung to because life is more than what they offer. To live so is to be at once fully in the world and quietly oriented beyond it — which is the Sanatan vision of a wholly human life.