Advaita Vedanta holds that liberation, moksha, comes through jnana, a direct and discriminating knowledge of the self as identical with Brahman, and that neither ritual action nor devotional practice can themselves deliver that liberation, however valuable each may be in preparing a person to receive the knowledge when it comes. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III explains that the school's reasoning follows from its diagnosis of bondage itself as a form of ignorance, avidya, a mistaken perception that takes the self to be limited, embodied and distinct from Brahman, so that what ends bondage cannot logically be an action, since action produces new results and cannot itself remove a misperception, but only a correction of the perception, which is what knowledge specifically does and nothing else can substitute for. An Introduction to Hinduism records that this is why the school treats ritual worship and devotional practice as belonging to a genuinely preparatory stage, purifying and stilling the mind so that the discriminating knowledge can eventually arise in it, rather than dismissing them as worthless, but the school is emphatic that the knowledge itself, once it arises, is what actually liberates, not the practices that made a person ready to receive it.