Not a destination reached after death. Not a reward for good behaviour. In Advaita, mokṣa is the recognition of what is already the case — that the self was never bound, and bondage was a misidentification, not a fact.
Imagine someone who has been a prisoner for ten thousand years — so long that they no longer remember there was ever a world outside the prison. One day, a stranger comes and says: the prison door was never locked. It has no lock. It never did. The prisoner looks at the door, pushes it, and it opens. They walk out.
The prisoner was not changed by this. They did not acquire new powers or travel to a new realm. What changed was only the false belief that they were imprisoned. The recognition of the unlocked door is mokṣa. The door was always open. The ten thousand years of imprisonment were the bondage of the false belief.
This is Advaita's claim. The self is Brahman. It was never actually bound. What is called bondage is the belief — arising through māyā — that the self is a limited, separate individual. The recognition that this was never true, that the self was always Brahman, is liberation. And it can happen now, while alive, in this life. It does not require death.
Advaita's most distinctive contribution to Indian soteriology is jīvanmukti — liberation while still in the body, while still alive. Many Indian philosophical traditions locate final liberation at death or after death (videhamukti). Śaṅkara argues that since bondage is a misidentification (not an ontological condition), and since misidentification can be removed by knowledge, liberation is possible now. The body continues after the recognition — it functions until its karmic momentum (prārabdha karma) is exhausted — but the person is no longer identified with it. The film continues playing; the viewer is no longer lost in it.
Mokṣa removes the false identification with the limited self — the sense of being a bounded individual separate from the whole. It removes the fundamental suffering (duḥkha) that arises from this false identification: the chronic sense of incompleteness, the fear of death (as the death of the limited self), the craving for objects to fill the void of the missing ground. It does not remove the body, the personality, or the phenomenal world. The jīvanmukta (liberated while living) continues to act, to speak, to have relationships. But they act from the ground of non-dual awareness rather than from the contracted sense of being a separate self.
The critical Advaita claim: mokṣa is not a product of action (karma-phala), not a product of meditation as a causal practice, and not a product of ritual. It is the result of knowledge — specifically, of the direct recognition (aparokṣānubhūti) that the self is Brahman. Actions can purify the mind (citta-śuddhi), meditation can still the mind (citta-śānti), both are preparatory. But the recognition itself is produced only by the Mahāvākya heard from the teacher and understood directly. You cannot work your way to Brahman because you are already Brahman. You can only stop working your way away from it.
A major question in Advaita soteriology: if knowledge destroys ignorance instantly (as Śaṅkara argues), why does the jīvanmukta's body continue? Why does the liberated person not simply cease to exist? Śaṅkara's answer: prārabdha karma (karma already in motion, which has already produced the current birth) continues to unfold until exhausted, regardless of the knowledge that supervenes. The analogy: an arrow already released continues until it strikes its target, even after the bowman recognises the target was mistaken. The body and its experiences continue; but the identification that creates suffering does not. Death of the body ends the jīvanmukta's jīvanmukti and begins videhamukti — liberation without body, from which no rebirth occurs.
Śaṅkara distinguishes three karma categories relevant to mokṣa. Sañcita karma: accumulated karma from all past lives — destroyed instantly by knowledge of Brahman, as a heap of cotton is destroyed by a single spark. Āgāmin karma: karma being generated currently — after liberation, no new karma is generated, because the false agent (the separate self) no longer exists. Prārabdha karma: karma already bearing fruit in this life — this alone continues. The jīvanmukta's body-mind continues its trajectory; the jīvanmukta is no longer the author of it.
The three main Vedānta schools differ fundamentally on the nature of mokṣa. For Advaita: mokṣa is the recognition of non-duality — the individual self merges into and is seen to have always been identical with Brahman. For Viśiṣṭādvaita (Rāmānuja): mokṣa is the liberation of the individual soul to dwell in eternal proximity to a personal God — the individual retains its identity. For Dvaita (Madhva): mokṣa is the soul's eternal beatific enjoyment of God's presence — individual and God remain eternally distinct. The debate between these three positions is one of the most sustained in the history of Indian philosophy and remains unresolved.