Textual context
Vairagya, dispassion, names the tenth chapter. In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras it walks beside practice, abhyasa, and the two together still the mind over years. Ashtavakra sets practice aside and lets dispassion do the work alone; in his telling it asks for no discipline and arrives through seeing.
The same note sounds much later in Ramakrishna, who spoke of a dispassion that costs no effort because it is the natural light of a person’s own nature. Ashtavakra’s eight verses describe that light.
Dispassion
Non-attachment · 8 shlokas
After disenchantment comes dispassion, and the step between them is short. In eight verses Ashtavakra describes a release that comes from looking plainly at what a man owns and at what he has already lost, with no philosophy required of the one who looks.
Rupa Goswami, in the Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu, divided renunciation in two: phalgu, the dry kind that pushes things away, and yukta, the kind that uses everything in the service of God. Ashtavakra’s dispassion sits beneath both, at the level of a man’s own nature, before any question of keeping or giving up arises.
So far
After disenchantment, dispassion. The boy tells the king what craving is and where it lives, and asks him to stop, today.
Ashtavakra opens the tenth chapter with a list of things to give up, and the first two could come from any teacher: kama, desire, which he calls an enemy outright, and artha, wealth, which comes with its misfortunes packed inside it. The third is the one that makes the court look up. Dharma too, duty, merit, the whole order of right action a king exists to uphold, is to be set down, because, the verse says, dharma is the cause of the other two. Then it goes further and asks Janaka to let go of his regard for anything at all, the attention that lends things their weight. The second verse hands him a measure. Friends, land, wealth, house, wife, inheritance: look at the whole estate the way you look at a dream, or a conjuror’s show in the market, and give it three days, or five.
Shlokas 1 · 2
Give up desire, the enemy, and wealth, which is crowded with misfortune, and dharma too, the cause of both; let go of your regard for everything.
Look on friends, land, wealth, house, wife, inheritance and all such possessions as a dream, or a magic show that lasts three or five days.
Then the root. Wherever craving is, trishna, the thirst, there the world is, and the world is nowhere else. A hermit in a cave who still thirsts has carried samsara in with him; a man in the middle of the bazaar who has stopped thirsting is free where he stands. Janaka, on a throne, hears which of the two he might be. Ashtavakra tells him to lean on dispassion that has ripened, praudha, the kind that holds on its own, and to be happy. The fourth verse states the whole matter as a sutra a child could memorize. Bondage is made of craving and nothing else; the end of craving is what the word moksha names. Then one more thing, almost an aside: the plain refusal to cling, repeated at every moment, brings with it the satisfaction of having gained something, again and again, with nothing acquired.
Shlokas 3 · 4
Wherever there is craving, know that the world is there. Rest on mature dispassion, be free of craving, and be happy.
Bondage is made of craving alone, and its ending is called liberation. By simply not clinging to existence, the joy of attainment comes again and again.
Now Ashtavakra speaks to the king directly, and the sentence has the shape of a verdict. You are one, you are conscious, you are pure; this whole inert universe is unreal; and ignorance itself, which the scholars in this hall have spent their lives trying to remove, is nothing at all. Then the question that follows from it: what is left that you want to know? The appetite for knowledge is the last of the hungers to go, and in a court of learned men it is the one most honored. Ashtavakra points at it. The sixth verse turns the king toward his own past, lives of it. Kingdoms, sons, wives, bodies, pleasures: in birth after birth Janaka held each of them as tightly as he holds Mithila, and in birth after birth each was lost. The list is a king’s list, and the boy knows whom he is talking to.
Shlokas 5 · 6
You are one, conscious and pure; the universe is inert and unreal; ignorance too is nothing at all. What is there, even so, that you still wish to know?
Kingdoms, sons, wives, bodies and pleasures have been lost to you birth after birth, attached to them though you were.
The chapter ends in something close to weariness, and the weariness is on the king’s behalf. Enough of wealth, enough of desire, enough even of the good deeds a man does to feel clean; the mind has wandered after all three through the wilderness of the world and has never once found a place to rest. The last verse puts the span of that wandering into a question: in how many births has this body, this mind, this tongue done the painful, exhausting work of karma? Nobody can count them. Then the imperative, with no softness of advice in it. Let it stop, now, today. Adya, the word for this day, is the whole of Ashtavakra’s method: whatever is to be done can be done only at the moment it is noticed. In the eleventh chapter he tells the king what the man who has stopped looks like from inside.
Shlokas 7 · 8
Enough of wealth, of desire, even of virtuous action. In the wilderness of the world the mind has found no rest in any of these.
In how many births have you not toiled at painful, wearying action with body, mind and speech? Now, at last, let it cease.