 Śaṅkara is ambivalent about actions such as yogic meditation, ritual practice, or ethical duties within his method. On the one hand he strives to undermine the importance of mental or physical action as an independent methodology for liberation. Action is a cause for bondage, not a means of liberation, because it always presupposes the reality of individual agency and contributes to a cycle of further desire and action. Furthermore, any product of action is finite and transient (Potter 1981: 38–41). Śaṅkara views action as having no epistemic fruitfulness independent of a means of knowledge. He draws a critical distinction based on content dependence. Physical actions such as ritual performance or mental actions like imagination or meditation are dependent on an individual’s will. They arise independently of the nature of the thing concerned. Veridical cognition, however, is ultimately dependent on the nature of the object. It is determined by the object through a proper means of knowledge, with no options or alternatives in terms of an agent’s choice. Action is therefore incapable of providing veridical knowledge whatsoever, let alone knowledge of non-duality (BrSūBh 1.1.4). This critique of action collapses any methodological dichotomy of theory and practice, which is intrinsic to both ritual practice and yogic meditation methods. Liberating self-knowledge is not subject to any kind of ritual injunctions. It is not procedural knowledge, nor the result of procedural knowledge. (See Ram-Prasad 2000 on Śaṅkara’s distinction of knowledge and action. See Bader 1990 and Dalal 2016 on his approach to meditation).