In the Ashtavakra Gita, the relationship between knowledge (jnana) and liberation (moksha) is presented as one of identity rather than sequence. Liberation is not portrayed as a distant goal attained after a long spiritual journey, but as the very nature of true knowledge itself. When the text speaks of jnana, it is not referring to conceptual understanding or scriptural erudition, but to the direct recognition that one is the pure, actionless Self, the witnessing consciousness distinct from body, mind, and world. Bondage is nothing more than the belief “I am the body, I am the doer, I am the enjoyer,” and this belief is what the text calls ignorance. When this misidentification falls away through clear seeing, what remains is recognized as ever-free; liberation is simply this recognition.

From this standpoint, knowledge and liberation arise together as a single event of insight, and the Gita repeatedly stresses the immediacy of this. As soon as self-knowledge dawns, bondage is said to end at once, because the very notion of a bound individual is seen as a superimposition upon the Self. The world, body, and mind may continue to appear, yet they are known as insubstantial appearances in consciousness, which itself is untouched and unmodified. Thus there is no separate state to be attained beyond this understanding, nor any further transformation that needs to occur in reality; what changes is only vision, not the Self.

Within this vision, all other means—rituals, actions, even elaborate disciplines—are relegated to a preparatory or secondary status at best. They may help refine the mind so that it can receive and abide in this knowledge, but they are not themselves the means to moksha. The text presents jnana alone as the direct and sufficient means, because it cancels bondage by canceling the very assumption of a limited person who could be bound. Once this knowledge is firm, there is nothing more to be done for liberation, and even the impulse to seek is understood as resting on the illusion that something real is lacking. The Ashtavakra Gita thus frames spiritual life as a radical shift from striving to simple recognition: the discovery that the Self was never bound and has always been free.