Liberation in Advaita is not death. The jīvanmukta — liberated while living — continues in a body, in the world, in relationships. What has changed is not the circumstances but the identification. The burnt rope holds its shape but cannot bind.
The word jīvanmukta combines jīvan (living, while alive) and mukta (liberated). One who is free while still in a body. Still breathing, still eating, still walking through the world — and free.
What is free? Not the body — the body is still subject to hunger, age, weather, illness, and eventual death. Not the personality — the jīvanmukta may still have characteristic traits, preferences, even emotions. What is free is the identification: the deep-seated sense of being a separate, threatened ego that believes it can be destroyed is gone. What remains is the pure witnessing awareness that was always there — now recognised as what it is, rather than misidentified as a limited individual person.
The body continues because prārabdha karma — the karma that generated this particular birth — continues to operate. It runs its course. Think of an arrow already in flight: the moment you release an arrow, the act of releasing is done. You cannot take it back. It will fly until it stops. Prārabdha is the arrow already in flight. The recognition of Brahman does not pull the arrow back. It only means no new arrows are shot — no new karma is generated through identification-driven action.
What the jīvanmukta is like — how they appear from outside — varies. Some are recognised as teachers. Some live quietly, unremarkably. Some continue active lives in the world. The tradition does not insist on a uniform external profile. The uniformity is internal: the absence of the compulsive, fearful movement of the ego seeking permanence in impermanent things.
The distinction between jīvanmukti (liberation while living) and videhamukti (liberation at death) is specific to the Advaita tradition. Many Indian schools held that liberation — the final removal of bondage — requires the falling of the body. Advaita's position, argued in the Brahmasūtra Bhāṣya (4.1) and the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, is that liberation is the removal of avidyā (ignorance). Since avidyā is a cognitive condition rather than a physical one, its removal does not require the physical event of death. The body can continue; the misidentification can cease.
Three types of karma are relevant. Sañcita karma — the accumulated karma of all past lives — is destroyed by liberating knowledge (fire destroys a pile of seeds: they retain their form but have lost the capacity to sprout). Āgāmin karma — actions performed after liberation — produces no new bondage because they are performed without the ego-identification that generates karma in the first place (a burnt rope holds its shape but cannot bind). Prārabdha karma — karma already in motion, already producing the current birth — cannot be cancelled by knowledge and must exhaust itself.
The Vivekacūḍāmaṇi's description of the jīvanmukta (v. 426–430): established in the recognition of Brahman-Ātman identity; seeing the self in all beings and all beings in the self; free from ahaṃkāra (ego-identification) and mamatā (possessiveness); not moved to delight by the pleasant or to grief by the unpleasant; equal-minded toward all.
The jīvanmukti doctrine created philosophical controversy within the tradition. The Vivaraṇa sub-school of Advaita (Prakāśātman) argued that jīvanmukti in the full sense requires the destruction of all three forms of karma — but prārabdha continues. If prārabdha karma continues, the body-mind continues, which means the upādhi (limiting adjunct) of the body-mind continues — so in what sense is the jīvanmukta free of the upādhi? The Bhāmatī sub-school (Vācaspati Miśra) argued that jīvanmukti is a provisional state: the full liberation (videhamukti) occurs at death. Śaṅkara's own Brahmasūtra Bhāṣya holds that jīvanmukti is genuine liberation: the upādhi of the body continues empirically, but the misidentification with it has been dissolved. The body is like the appearance of the second moon when you press one eye — the appearance is real at the empirical level; its recognition as mere appearance is the liberation. Both moons are visible; the wise one knows only one is real.