The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 1: The Witness

Mithila, the court of the Videhas. Janaka sits on the throne, a king with granaries, armies and, among the brahmins who argue in his hall, a reputation for being a learned man himself. In front of him stands a boy of twelve whose body bends in eight places, the same boy the courtiers laughed at when he came in, and who then out-argued the court’s champion in front of all of them. The hall has gone quiet. Janaka joins his palms, as a pupil does before a teacher, and asks three things in one breath: how knowledge is gained, how liberation will come, how dispassion is attained. Under the three questions lies a single belief, that something is still missing and must be fetched from somewhere. Ashtavakra’s first words go straight to that belief.

Ashtavakra answers at once, and the first thing he calls the king is what a father calls his own boy. A twelve-year-old says it to the king of Mithila, and nobody in the hall objects, because the debate with Vandi settled who the teacher is here. What follows sounds, at first, like the counsel any elder might give. If liberation is what Janaka wants, let him put the sense-objects down as he would a cup of poison, and take forbearance, honesty, compassion, contentment and truth as he would take nectar. Then, with the second verse, the counsel turns into something no elder says. Janaka is told he is none of the five elements the body is made of, earth, water, fire, air or space. He is what watches them, consciousness itself. A king knows himself through his body, his lineage, his crown; everyone does. Ashtavakra loosens that first knot gently: you are the one who sees the body.

Now comes the sentence that separates Ashtavakra from every teacher Janaka has heard before. Set the body to one side, rest in consciousness, and the result is immediate: happy, at peace, free of bondage, this very moment. Every other teacher in that hall would have laid out a road, years of discipline, stages, a far-off end. Ashtavakra gives the king a time, and the time is now. The fifth verse then takes away the two identities a king is built from. Janaka is not a brahmin or a kshatriya or anything the order of the four varnas can name; he is not a student, a householder, a forest-dweller or a renunciant, none of the four ashramas; he is not even something the senses could point to. He is unattached and formless, the witness of the whole world, and the verse ends on an imperative, be happy, because the happiness is already in place and only needs to be noticed.

The sixth verse reaches for the things a king lives by. Right and wrong, pleasure and pain, the whole ledger a ruler keeps of his days, belong to the mind, and the mind is something Janaka watches. He is neither the doer of his deeds nor the one who tastes their fruit, and he has been free all along. Then Ashtavakra names the single knot. Janaka is the one seer of everything that appears, and in his very nature he is free already; the only bondage he has is that he takes the one who sees for somebody other than himself. That is all the bondage there is. Correct that one mistake of sight and nothing is left to correct.

Ashtavakra now gives the king a picture. The thought “I am the doer” is a great black serpent, and Janaka has been bitten; the venom of it is in everything he does, every decree and every gift, because each of them carries the sting of a self that must perform. The antidote is a drink, the certainty “I am not the doer,” taken in like nectar. Then a second picture, fire. Ignorance stands like a dense forest, layer behind layer of it, and the king is handed one torch, the conviction “I am the one pure awareness.” Put the torch to the undergrowth and the whole forest goes at once, and the grief goes with it. Both verses end the same way, on the two words Ashtavakra keeps returning to. Be happy.

Then the oldest image in Vedanta, and Ashtavakra hands it to the king as if it were new. A man walking at dusk sees a snake across the path and fear goes through him; a lamp comes, and there was only a rope. The snake was imagined, and it was imagined on something real. The world, Ashtavakra says, appears in awareness the way that snake appeared on the rope, and the awareness it appears in is bliss, the highest bliss, and that awareness is Janaka. The eleventh verse then drops to the level of a proverb, the kind the market repeats: whoever takes himself to be free is free, and whoever takes himself to be bound is bound; as the thought, so the outcome. A king who has heard a thousand flatterers knows how much an opinion weighs. This one is different in kind, because it is an opinion about the one who holds opinions, and the verse invites Janaka to look and see whether it is true.

What the Atman is, Ashtavakra says in a single breath, the way a herald announces a king: witness, all-pervading, complete, one, free, consciousness, actionless, unattached, desireless, at peace. Ten words, for a court that has heard long titles read out before. Then a single small phrase at the end of the verse, as if, carries its whole weight: the Atman only seems caught in the world, and only through error. The thirteenth verse turns from description to instruction. Janaka is to dwell on himself as that unchanging, non-dual awareness, steady as the blacksmith’s anvil, which takes blow after blow and stays where it is while every shape is hammered out on top of it. The error to be set down is the thought “I am the reflection,” the “I” that changes with each circumstance, pleased in the morning and sour by evening; and along with it go all the notions, outer and inner, that the reflection collects.

Ashtavakra’s voice softens, and again he calls the king what a father calls a small son. For a long time, he tells him, you have been held by the noose of pride in the body, the certainty that you are this flesh with this name and this throne; here is a sword, the knowledge “I am awareness,” cut the noose with it and be happy. A father freeing a child from a tangle of rope speaks like this, and the sword he hands over is a single recognition. Then the fifteenth verse says a thing no yogi in that hall would have expected to hear. You are unattached, actionless, self-luminous, stainless; and your bondage is this, that you practice samadhi. Samadhi, the deepest absorption a yogi can reach, named as a bondage. The reasoning is simple once it is seen: someone sits down to enter samadhi, and a state that is entered is also left. Janaka is told he is what every state arises in, and that whatever meditation promised to bring him, he already is.

Then the scale changes. Until now Ashtavakra has been taking things away from the king, caste, stage of life, body, deeds; the sixteenth verse gives him the universe. The whole of it is pervaded by Janaka and strung on him as beads are strung on a thread, and the one warning in the verse is against smallness of mind, the shrinking that happens the moment a man agrees that he is the body. A king’s world is full of “mine,” and where “mine” grows large the “I” is left very small. The seventeenth verse is a list of what Janaka is to be, and it reads like the reverse of a royal title: needing nothing, changeless, full to the brim, cool at heart, bottomless in understanding, unshaken, with pure consciousness as his only inclination. Nothing on the list is to be achieved; it is a portrait, and Janaka is being asked to recognize the face.

The chapter’s last sayings are short. Whatever has form is to be known as unreal; the formless is what stays. Form is everything that takes a shape and gives it up again, body, mind, the court, Mithila itself; the formless is awareness. Ashtavakra attaches a promise to the teaching, and it is the plain promise the Upanishads make: for the one who has taken this truth in, there is no coming back into birth. Then the mirror. A face appears in a mirror, and the mirror is there inside the face and all around it, untouched by what it shows. So the supreme Lord is inside this body and on every side of it. The image answers a belief most people hold without ever stating it, that awareness is something small kept inside the skull. The verse turns the picture around: the body sits in awareness the way the face sits in the mirror.

The last image is the one the whole chapter comes to rest on, and it is the simplest thing in the room: a clay pot. The space inside the pot and the space outside it are one space; the clay wall draws a line through it, and the line divides nothing. Every body in that hall is such a pot, the king’s and the boy’s and the courtiers’ along the walls, and the Brahman within each is the one unbroken Brahman, as present in the last water-carrier as on the throne. Ashtavakra stops there. The boy who was laughed at when he walked in has spoken for nineteen verses, and the hall has not moved. In the second chapter Janaka answers him, and what comes out of the king is wonder.