Mokṣa

Saṃsāra is the problem. Mokṣa is the name for its solution — and it is, for almost every Hindu school, the highest of the human aims.

Mokṣa comes from the root muc, to loose, release, let go — Böhtlingk and Roth derive the noun von mokṣ, the corresponding verbal stem; Monier-Williams's own entry for mokṣa gives no root, so the derivation is cited here rather than assumed. That entry gives "emancipation, liberation, release from"; then "release from worldly existence or transmigration, final or eternal emancipation"; and, in a technical astronomical sense, the moment an eclipsed body is freed — the last contact of the shadow.