The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 16: Resting in the Self

Ashtavakra turns to his student and opens with a line meant to jolt him. Son, you may recite many scriptures again and again, or go on hearing them, and still that health, that rest in yourself, will elude you until you let everything go. “The forgetting of all,” it is a fearless claim. Is knowledge too a thing to be forgotten? Yes. Knowledge that stays stuck in thought has not yet become knowledge. Real health appears only in a forgetting so complete that even the memory of “I” falls away. This forgetting is a setting down of every notion that clings to the “I.” Read the scriptures, then set them aside. The health you seek is hidden in that setting aside.

Then he gives the discerning student an open license. O wise one, enjoy pleasures if you wish, act if you wish, sit in samadhi if you wish, do all three. The real point is this: only when your mind is emptied of every hope will it delight in the deepest joy. Pleasure, action, and samadhi, all three roads lie open, and joy arrives the moment “hope” is released. The true obstacle is attachment. Whatever you are doing, pause once and check, is some hope seated behind it? If the feeling “this is the fruit I must have” is present, hope is still alive. Let it drop. The work stays the same, and its taste changes.

Now Ashtavakra says something that overturns our everyday sense of things. Everyone suffers through effort, and almost no one sees it. From this single teaching a fortunate soul reaches peace. We assume effort brings happiness, yet inside every effort hides a sense of “lack,” and that sense of lack is the suffering. Recall for a moment all the goals you have reached. Each one held a single instant when you leapt from “I want this” to “it is done.” The pleasure after that leap lingered only briefly, and then “the next one” began.

Here Ashtavakra speaks with a teasing edge. The one who feels tired even in a task as small as the blink of an eye, that sovereign of idleness alone knows happiness, and no one else. “The sovereign of idleness,” he sharpens the phrase on purpose. Happiness lives in that deep rest where even the opening and closing of the eyes feels like “too much.” Do not take this shloka literally, the eye will still open and close. Its heart is simple: as little action as possible, as much stillness as possible. Whatever is not truly necessary to do today, do that much less.

Now he opens another deep point. When the mind slips free of the pair “this I did, this I did not do,” it grows indifferent to all four aims, dharma, wealth, desire, and moksha. This indifference to the four human aims is a fearless turn in Hindu thought, a release of all four goals, a rising above every purpose. Whatever work you are engaged in, ask yourself, “For which goal is this?” If the answer is “dharma, wealth, desire, or moksha,” you are still running in some race. Pause and consider again, can this race ever come to rest.

Now Ashtavakra sets three people face to face. The detached one hates the objects of the senses, and the attached one clings to them. The one who has risen above both grasping and renouncing is neither detached nor attached. Look closely: the attached one wants, the detached one refuses to want, and the knower neither wants nor refuses to want. The first two look like opposites from the outside, yet the game running underneath is the same, “me versus things.” This is why treating detachment itself as the destination is a mistake, since the detached one is only a mirror image of the attached. The knower stands in a third place, poised, beyond liking and disliking.

Then he gives the world the shape of a tree. This letting go and this holding on are the very sprout of the world-tree. As long as any craving lives within, the ground for the thought-free state is never laid. The world is a vast tree, and where does its seed lie hidden? In this very choosing of “let me keep this, let me drop that.” Every such decision grows a fresh leaf. The thought-free state is a natural condition in Advaita, and there is no need to bind it into a destination. And if “I must have the thought-free state” becomes the craving itself, that very craving turns into the largest obstacle of all.

Now he points toward a child. Engagement gives birth to attraction, and withdrawal to aversion; the steady one, past all pairs, simply stays as he is, like a child. A child does not choose between engagement and withdrawal, he simply “is.” He runs after nothing and flees from nothing. This is the state of the knower. Watch a small child. Look past the innocent face to the natural evenness in him. The child rages, laughs, and the very next moment forgets it all. The knower lives in exactly this state, and does so in full awareness.

Here a deep irony opens. The attached one wants to leave the world so that he may escape suffering. The one free of passion has no suffering to begin with, and so even while living in the world he feels no distress. The seeker wants to abandon the world in order to slip past suffering, while the knower, free of passion, has no suffering left at all. Where, then, is the need to abandon the world? The call to “renounce the world” usually rises out of a fear of suffering. The call of knowledge is this: cut the very root of suffering, and the world sets itself right on its own.

Now Ashtavakra draws attention to a subtle snare. Whoever carries pride even in moksha, and still holds attachment to the body, is neither a knower nor a yogi, he is merely a partaker in suffering. “Pride in moksha,” this is the finest noose of all. “I have attained moksha,” “I have become free,” if this ego survives, the knowing has stayed only half complete. Full knowledge is the kind in which even the feeling “I have attained” falls away. Look anywhere today and you will find many “liberated” people, each with a signature of his own. Use this shloka to check yourself once, “Does any pride in moksha remain?” If it does, the work is not yet finished.

And at the end Ashtavakra returns to the place where the chapter began. Though Shiva himself be your instructor, or Vishnu, or lotus-born Brahma, you will still not find health until you let everything go. The chapter opened with “forget all,” and it closes there too; the nine shlokas between were an unfolding of that one point. This symmetry of the two ends gives the chapter its force. The final message is this: no outer guru, not even Shiva arriving in person to speak, can complete the work for you without your own “forgetting of all.” Knowledge comes from outside, and its experience happens only within.