The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 17: The Nature of Truth

The first word Ashtavakra says is tena, by him, the way a man points across a room. He has just told the king that no teacher can give him rest while he holds on to what he knows; now he describes the one who has let go. That man has the fruit of knowledge and the fruit of yoga both, and the signs are plain: he is content, his senses are clear, and he delights in being alone. In a court where someone stands at every door, aloneness sounds like a loss. Ashtavakra’s second verse answers that: the knower of truth never grieves, because the whole cosmos is filled by that one alone, and a man who is everything has no one left to miss.

Then an image from the king’s own stables. An elephant that has fed on the sweet leaves of the sallaki will not touch the bitter neem, and no one has to forbid it; the better taste has settled the matter. So it is with the man who delights in the Self: the objects of the senses stop pleasing him on their own. Pleasures already enjoyed leave no mark on him, and pleasures not yet enjoyed raise no longing. The fifth verse goes further. Men who want enjoyment are everywhere, and men who want liberation can be found too; the great soul who wants neither is the rarest of all. Janaka, who began by asking how liberation would come, hears the wanting of it named as the last thing in the way.

Now the four aims a prince is raised on. Dharma, wealth, pleasure and moksha are the whole curriculum of a royal education, and a king spends his reign weighing them. Ashtavakra adds life and death to the list and says that some rare, large-hearted man has nothing to accept and nothing to reject among any of the six. He has no wish for the world to end and no grudge against its going on; he lives at ease on whatever livelihood arrives. The eighth verse shows how. The man knows himself fulfilled by the knowledge, and his intellect, the part of him that kept weighing and choosing, has melted away. He still sees, hears, touches, smells and eats; the one who used to claim the acts is gone.

The ninth verse would unsettle any courtier who heard it as a description of his king. In the man whose ocean of samsara has dried up, the gaze is vacant, action has no purpose, the senses hang idle, and neither desire nor aversion moves him. A court reads these as weakness in a ruler; Ashtavakra names them as the marks of freedom. The freed mind neither wakes nor sleeps, neither opens its eyes nor closes them, and Ashtavakra, who has spoken for sixteen chapters as if nothing could surprise him, lets out a cry of wonder. The line between waking and sleep, the first line every child learns, is one of the things that mind has left behind.

The word Ashtavakra chooses for the freed man in the eleventh verse belongs to the man on the throne. He rajate, he reigns, he shines like a king, and he does it everywhere, in the hall and on the road and in a farmer’s hut, because the shining comes from within and owes nothing to the seat. Every vasana that used to pull at him has let go. The twelfth verse counts his acts, eight of them: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, taking, speaking, walking. The list is the whole of an ordinary day, the king’s and the water-carrier’s alike, and all of it goes on. What has ended is the wanting and the not wanting that ran underneath.

The thirteenth verse takes away the six acts a court runs on. The freed man neither blames nor praises, is neither elated nor angry, neither gives nor takes; everywhere he is nirasa, without relish. A king does all six before noon. Then the two oldest tests. A woman full of desire stands in front of him, or death itself draws near, and his mind does not shake; that steadiness, with nothing added, is his freedom. The fifteenth verse widens the test to pleasure and pain, man and woman, fortune and ruin. For the steady man who sees the same in all of them there is no difference anywhere, and the hall hears the king’s granaries and armies placed on the same level as their loss.

The sixteenth verse is a list of absences, and one item on it stops the ear. In the man whose wandering through the world has ended there is no violence, no arrogance, no meekness, no astonishment, no disturbance, and no compassion either. Compassion is the virtue Ashtavakra himself prescribed in the first chapter, to be taken up like nectar. Here it stands beside violence as one more stirring of the mind, and in this man the mind has stopped stirring; the verse says nothing about what he does for others, only what no longer moves in him. The seventeenth verse guards the other side. The freed man does not hate the objects of the senses, and he does not crave them. He takes what comes and lets be what does not.

The last three strokes go inward. The man of emptied mind does not even register the choice between composure and distraction, between what helps him and what harms him; he sits as though in kaivalya itself, the aloneness the yogis name as their final goal. The nineteenth verse names what he has lost: the word mine, the word I, and every hope that lived on them, all melted away within, so that he acts and does not act in the same motion. Then the twentieth. The mind’s bright activity, its delusions, its dreams and its dullness, the four weathers of a day and a night, are gone from him, and he has arrived at a state with no name. Ashtavakra sets the brush down. The king the twenty strokes describe sits in front of him, unmoved by any of them.