The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 1: The Witness

The court of Mithila. Janaka sits on the throne, a king, and held to be accomplished in his own right as well. Yet one question has been turning inside him for years. The boy-guru Ashtavakra stands before him, and Janaka, palms joined, asks three things at once. How is knowledge gained, how will liberation come, and how will dispassion arrive. Beneath all three questions sits one quiet assumption, that something still remains, that something is yet to be attained. From the very next shloka, Ashtavakra will lay his hand on that assumption.

Ashtavakra’s answer is direct, and full of love. Son, if you want liberation, then give up the sense-objects like poison, and drink forgiveness, simplicity, compassion, contentment, and truth like nectar. This is the foundation of the whole text. He prescribed no method, no technique. He named a single stance, distance from indulgence and nearness to the virtues, just that small a beginning. Then he goes deeper. You are not earth, not water, not fire, not air, not even space. If you want liberation, know this: you are the witness of them all, the atman (the self), consciousness itself. The body is made of these five elements, and like all of us, Janaka’s sense of who he was had been tied to the body. Ashtavakra gently loosens that identification: you are the one who sees the body.

Now Ashtavakra says the thing that sets him apart from all the other teachers. If you set the body aside and come to rest in consciousness, then this very instant you will be happy, at peace, and free of all bondage. Another guru describes a long process; Ashtavakra points to recognition. One pause, one shift in identity, and that is all. Then he cuts through both identities at once, the social and the bodily. You do not belong to the Brahmin or any other varna (social order), nor to any ashrama (stage of life), nor are you an object the senses can show. You are unattached, formless, the witness of the entire universe; so be happy. He states it as a command, because the happiness is already there, kept in place from the start.

Dharma and adharma, pleasure and pain, these are all objects of the mind, and not yours. O all-pervading one, you are neither the doer nor the enjoyer; you have always been free. This is Ashtavakra’s recurring note: liberation already is, present the whole time, and the only thing missing was the recognition of it. Then he brings another turn. You alone are the seer of everything, and you have always been all but free. Your bondage amounts only to this, that you have taken the seer to be someone else. So why not completely free? Because one small slip remains, mistaking the one who sees for something that is seen. The moment that slip is corrected, that is liberation.

Here Ashtavakra sets down a sharp picture. ‘I am the doer’, this huge black snake of ego has bitten you. ‘I am not the doer’, drink the nectar of this conviction and be happy. A snake bites only once, and the venom spreads through the whole body; in just the same way, the small thought ‘I am the doer’ fills an entire life with strain. And its cure is a single firm conviction, held once, with no daily practice required. Then he brings in the metaphor of fire. ‘I am the one, pure awareness’, with the fire of this certainty burn down the dense forest of ignorance, and be happy, free of sorrow. Ignorance is dense, layer beneath layer; yet a single fire of certainty turns all the layers to ash at once.

Now comes that famous image of Vedanta, the rope and the snake. That awareness in which this whole world is imagined the way a snake is imagined on a rope, that bliss, that supreme bliss, is what you are; so be happy. In the dark you see a rope and fear grips you, a snake; the moment light arrives you know it was a rope all along. Ashtavakra never calls the world nonexistent. He calls it misperceived, other than it looks. And then a line that reads almost like a proverb. Whoever holds himself to be free is free; whoever holds himself to be bound is bound. As your understanding, so your destiny. This is more than positive thinking. The point is to see it directly, that you are already free, and not merely to accept the claim.

Now Ashtavakra sets down the atman’s full introduction in a single breath. The atman is the witness, all-pervading, complete, one, free, pure consciousness, actionless, unattached, desireless, at peace; through delusion alone it appears caught in the world, while it never is. Ten qualities, and one word, ‘iva’, meaning ‘as if’; that one word carries the whole difference. Of all these, seize a single word, witness; the rest all follow from it. Then he gives the method. Seek out the atman as the unchanging, nondual awareness (kutastha), and dropping the delusion ‘I am the appearance’, let go of every notion, outer and inner. Kutastha is that which never changes, the still upper stone of the grinding mill; and the appearance is that ‘I’ which keeps shifting with circumstances, now glad, now low. That changing ‘I’ is not the real one.

Ashtavakra’s voice turns tender here. Son, you have been tied for a long time by the noose of pride in the body; with the sword of this knowledge, ‘I am awareness’, cut that noose and be happy. This is the same affection that lives in the voice of a father freeing a child from a rope, and the instrument is recognition, not any chain of reasoning. Then a startling remark. You are unattached, actionless, self-luminous, and untainted; your one bondage is that you are practicing samadhi. Even samadhi, a bondage? Yes, because someone sits down to do samadhi, and samadhi is a state that comes and goes. Ashtavakra says you are beyond every state; whatever meditation was meant to deliver, you already are it.

Now Ashtavakra turns toward expansion. This whole world is pervaded by you, in truth threaded through you; you are of the nature of pure awareness, so do not fall into a small and narrow mind. This is a warning. The mind shrinks when it accepts ‘I am the body’, and it grows when it recognizes ‘I am consciousness’; where ‘mine’ swells very large, the ‘I’ is left very small. Then he lays down a string of qualities. Independent, changeless, self-reliant, cool in disposition, unfathomable in intellect, unshaken, simply dwell in pure consciousness. Nothing to want, nothing that changes, the mind cool, the intellect bottomless, the heart steady. There is nothing here to ‘become’. This is the nature you have always had; simply rest in it.

Now the chapter moves toward its final aphorisms. Know the formed to be unreal and the formless to be unmoving; with the teaching of this truth, the possibility of birth no longer remains. The formed is whatever has shape, whatever changes and ends, the body, the mind, the world; the formless is the atman, it is consciousness. Ashtavakra is pointing at the ‘I’ that is born again and again within this very life, more than at any future birth; every state of ego is a new birth, and this teaching breaks that chain. Then the image of the mirror. Just as the one same mirror is there both inside and outside the form that appears in it, so too, inside this body and outside it, on every side, is the one same Supreme Lord. We think consciousness is inside, shut in the brain; but the sense of ‘inside’ takes shape only against ‘outside’. For consciousness there is no inside or outside at all; the body appears within it, not confined by it.

And at the end, that image of the pot and space on which the whole chapter comes to rest. Just as one all-pervading space is the same one both outside the pot and inside it, so the eternal, unbroken Brahman is the same one in all beings. The space that appears inside a clay pot is the very same outer space; it has no separateness of its own, the walls of the pot merely stage the illusion of division. Every body is a pot like this, and the ‘I’ inside it is the same as the ‘I’ inside the next pot; and all of it together is that one all-pervading Brahman. Right here the chapter is complete. The three questions have their three answers: knowledge lies in recognizing the witness, liberation already is, and dispassion lies in seeing the sense-objects as poison. Janaka’s response comes next, in chapter two.