No English word for Mokṣa

And why that might be the point

And why that might be the point

I have been sitting with a question for a while now. What is the right English word for mokṣa?

It is not a trivial question — The word we choose shapes what students and we understand. It shapes what we seek.

So I tried each candidate on, the way I have experimented the best wok to sauté my  Hakka noodles.

Liberation

This one is closest to the root. Mokṣa comes from muc — to release, to free. Liberation captures the undoing of bondage, the snapping of saṃsāric chains. Most scholars prefer it. And yet, something feels amiss. Liberation sounds like an escape — a movement away from suffering, not an arrival at truth. It is a negative freedom. It tells you what you are leaving, not what you are entering.

Self-realization

Ramana Maharshi and Yogananda gave us this one, and it points beautifully toward ātma-jñāna — the recognition of the true Self. But modern culture has quietly hollowed it out. Today, self-realization floats around in the language of life coaching and personal potential. Worse, the very word self implies there is a self to realize — when the entire thrust of Advaita is that the individual self dissolves into the recognition that it was never separate to begin with.

Transcendence

Going beyond ordinary experience — yes, that is true of mokṣa. But transcendence is borrowed from phenomenology and Western mysticism. It is used for peak experiences, for flow states, for that feeling you get on a mountain at sunrise. It doesn't carry the finality or irreversibility that mokṣa implies. You transcend; you come back. Mokṣa is not something you come back from.

Freedom

This is the word I loved when I first came to the Bhagavad Gītā. There is something in it that feels immediate, almost bodily — the way a held breath finally releases, the way a door long bolted swings open. Freedom doesn't require a philosophy degree. It lands in the chest before it reaches the mind. And for a while, that felt like exactly the right quality for mokṣa to have.

But I grew uneasy with it, the way you grow uneasy with a translation that is almost right. Freedom in contemporary usage is horizontal — it is freedom to do, freedom to choose, freedom to become. It lives in the register of agency and possibility. Mokṣa is none of those things. It is not the expansion of options. It is the falling away of the one who was choosing. Freedom points toward the open road. Mokṣa says: there is no traveler.

Then .....sauté

Sauté is a French word. It means to jump — from sauter. It describes a specific technique: constant movement in a hot pan, food tossed or stirred so it cooks evenly and quickly without burning. There is no English word for this. Not stir-fry, not pan-cook, not fry. None of them mean what sauté means.

So we borrowed the French word and made it our own. Every English speaker who cooks knows what it means. We did not force it into an English mold. We expanded our vocabulary to meet it.

What word will I choose that will carry the weight of Moksa ?

Liberation ( it points toward it), self-realization ( recognition is part of it), or Transcendence ( it moves beyond ordinary experience). I think, for now, I will use Liberation to meet my students where they are at and use mokṣa — a word that holds within it the full weight of the tradition: the undoing of false identity, the recognition of what was always already true, the irreversible shift from avidyā to vidyā, from ignorance to knowing in my own practice..

intention is to become moksa-  a word that does not need translation because it carries its own meaning — for anyone willing to learn it.

Namaste

Savitha

@savitha.enner

Pic credit : Lorriane Hughes