A quarter of a century has passed since Walter Slaje demonstrated the importance of the Kashmirian recension of the text that was printed and popularly known under the name Yogavāsiṣṭha. As it turned out the text originally bore the title Mokṣopāya, but became known to the rest of the Indian subcontinent in an abridged version simply called Vāsiṣṭha. In Kashmir, the original, written in the 10th century, remained the standard version, but was ignored.
The project of editing the Mokṣopāya has now been completed – the final volume will be published shortly – and in this context a small symposium was held in Marburg to mark this date. Some of the lectures given there are reproduced in this publication: Walter Slaje deals with the term ”Yoga” in Yogavāsiṣṭha, Roland Steiner analyses the story of Prahlāda, and Jürgen Hanneder writes on liberation, the story of the meditating monk and the summaries of the text. In Eric Steinschneider’s analysis of the Tamil transformation of the Vāsiṣṭha, the reader can also catch a glimpse of what has become possible through the Mokṣopāya project when specialists of further disciplines follow the text into new languages and contexts.