The value of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha has long been known to students of Theosophy. Already in 1936 the classic study of this text, The Philosophy of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha by Sanskrit scholar B. L. Atreya, was published by the Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras, India. As I had noted elsewhere, the distinctive terms used by the Advaita Vedāntin Theosophist T. Subba Row, cid-ākāśa and also cit-śakti, do not come from the standard treatises on Advaita Vedānta, but rather come from the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha.

In the early 1990s an extraordinary discovery was made. In the process of assembling manuscripts from which to prepare a critical edition of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha, Indologist Walter Slaje found an entirely distinct, unrevised recension of this text that called itself the Mokṣopāya, the “Means to Liberation.” It is equally huge, about 30,000 verses, but it preserves a considerably more original version of the text.

Walter Slaje wrote about this in full detail in his 1994 German language book, Vom Mokṣopāya-Śāstra zum Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha-Mahārāmāyaṇa (“From the Mokṣopāya-Śāstra to the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha-Mahārāmāyaṇa”). This major find led to the Mokṣopāya Project, with government and university funding to prepare a critical edition of this large and important text. A brief account of this in English by Slaje, titled “The Mokṣopāya Project,” was published in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 77, 1996, pp. 209-221 (attached).

In the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha, a pervasive layer of Vedānta ideas has been added to the advaita or non-dual teachings of the Mokṣopāya. Perhaps the most significant difference between the two is the well-known fact that Advaita Vedānta takes the authority of scripture as the only truly valid means of higher knowledge, thereby discounting the role of reasoning in reaching higher knowledge. The Mokṣopāya does just the opposite, taking reasoning as the valid means of higher knowledge, and entirely discounting the authority of scripture. Another difference is that terminology now found primarily in Buddhist texts has been systematically replaced. In this, and in its emphasis on pure advaita or non-dualism, the Mokṣopāya is very reminiscent of Gauḍapāda’s Māṇḍūkya-kārikā. Slaje describes some of the “willful changes” that were made in the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha in the above-mentioned article, p. 212, including:

“an attempt to ‘vedānticize’ the text, which—though it does teach monism (advaita)—has nothing in common with the particularities of Śaṅkara’s Vedānta, but indeed very much with Gauḍapāda’s Kārikās and the Laṅkāvatārasūtra of the Mahāyāna.”

In Gauḍapāda’s text we had only a small example of these teachings, about 200 verses. Now we have a massive source of these teachings in its unrevised and more original form. It promises to be a fundamental resource for students of Theosophy.

The Mokṣopāya project has been underway for about two decades now, and the long-awaited results of this painstaking research are now seeing the light of day. In the 1990s three small volumes of the fragmentary commentary Mokṣopāya-ṭīkā were published, followed by a fourth in 2002, giving a taste of what this unrevised text has to offer. In 2011 the first two volumes of the critical edition of the Mokṣopāya itself were published, and the third volume in 2012. They were published in Germany by Harrassowitz (http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de), and are expensive. I have not yet seen them. Of particular interest for Book of Dzyan research is the large third chapter, the utpatti-prakaraṇa or section on cosmogony, published as volume 2 of the now available volumes.