The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 2: Wonder

One sentence from the guru, and something inside Janaka breaks open. No reasoning, no slow gathering of sense, only the direct jolt of recognition. From his mouth comes “Aho,” “Oh!” and this note of wonder becomes the doorway into every shloka that follows. In his very first breath he cries out that he is stainless and still, awareness itself, past all of nature; and for so long he had let himself be fooled by his own delusion. The delusion was self-made all along, a trick he had played on himself with his own hands.

Then that same recognition begins to spread. Just as this one body is lit by his consciousness, the whole world too appears within his light. From this rises a strange paradox: the entire world is his, or nothing at all is his. Both say the same thing, because when “I” am consciousness, everything appears within it, and when “I” am consciousness, no separate grasper is left over. In this same experience he goes on to say that the whole universe, his body included, has now fallen away from him, and by some subtle skill the supreme Self begins to show through. Janaka never gave up his throne, yet the “world” seemed to drop away for him, because the “I” had lifted free of it.

Now Janaka opens one simile after another, as if pointing from every side toward a single truth. Just as waves, foam, and bubbles are never separate from water, this world that has come out of the atman (the self) is never separate from the atman. Just as a close look shows cloth to be nothing but thread, careful inquiry shows this world to be nothing but the atman. And just as the sugar made from cane juice stays filled through and through with that same juice, this world imagined within him is soaked without break in him. Water in every wave, cloth in every thread, consciousness in every particle: the world is the solid form of consciousness itself.

Then Janaka returns to the same rope-and-snake image that Ashtavakra used earlier, though now he wields it himself. Not knowing the atman, one sees a world; the moment the atman is known, the seeing stops, exactly as not knowing the rope makes a snake appear, and recognizing the rope makes the snake vanish. He goes on to say that light is his very own nature, and he stands not the least bit apart from it; whenever the world lights up, that light is his. The proof of every experience is that it “appears,” and appearing is the work of consciousness alone, so whatever shows itself is a glimpse of that one light.

Now the wonder catches a deeper hold. Janaka says, Aho! This world, imagined out of ignorance, appears within him, like silver in a seashell, a snake in a rope, and the illusion of water in the sun’s rays. In all three the base is real and the image laid over it is illusion. And whatever has come out of him will dissolve back into him, as a pot returns to clay, a wave to water, and a bracelet to gold. The “thing” that appears in between was only a shape of the base; arising, holding, and dissolving are three plays within one and the same base.

From here Janaka’s voice shifts into a strange act of homage: he begins to bow to his own self. Aho, homage to himself, for he has no destruction; let the whole world from Brahma down to a blade of grass be wiped away, and still he will remain. Then the same homage repeats: he is one, even while wearing a body; he goes nowhere and comes from nowhere, and stands filling the entire universe. And once more, he finds no one as skilled as himself, for without ever touching a body he has held up this whole universe for age upon age, the way the sun keeps the earth lit without ever touching it.

The same homage rises once more, but now an open paradox comes with it: nothing at all is his, or else everything that speech and mind can reach is his. Both are true at once, because there is no separate “I” left to hold a hoard, and nothing is left lying outside that consciousness. In this same recognition he calls even the triad of knowledge, the known, and the knower false; the knower, the knowing, and the known appear as three only through ignorance, and the stainless one in whom all three shimmer is himself.

Now Janaka lays his hand straight on the root from which all suffering rises. Aho, the root of duality: this very sense of “two” is the deadliest poison; the nectar of Self-knowledge has come to him, and now he tears this duality out. This same sense of “two” also gives birth to fear, for ignorance breeds fear and knowledge becomes the ground of fearlessness. Once, while he was in ignorance, he was afraid; now he is fearless, so whom would he fear, when the one who fears and the one who frightens have both dissolved into a single consciousness?

Then another act of homage, but this time he drops even the word “knowledge.” Aho, homage to himself, for it is not even a “knowledge” that could be gotten from somewhere; the way a sight is experienced on its own, it is the first and most direct of all experience. The word “knowledge” sometimes turns this into a far-off attainment held at a distance, so he sets it aside and comes straight to “experience.” And at once he returns to the root of suffering: the root of suffering is duality, and there is no other medicine for it; all that appears is mrisha, and he himself is a pure essence of consciousness. Here the word “mrisha” points to a thing that is not the way it appears, and it carries no claim that the thing has no existence at all.

Now Janaka binds his own nature into the plainest words: he is awareness alone, and whatever limiting labels there were, he himself had imagined out of ignorance; for one who reflects on this without pause, the ground settles into nirvikalpa, the state past all wavering. An upadhi, a limiting overlay, is like the color of a cloud settling on clear water: the water stays the same, and the color rides only on the surface. From this he goes on to say that he has neither bondage nor moksha (release); the illusion has grown quiet and lost its footing; Aho, the world rests in him, and in truth does not rest in him at all. Bondage never existed in the first place, so whose liberation could there be? It was only a belief, and now it has fallen away.

Here even the last support of imagination lets go. This whole universe, his body included, is nothing at all, and of this he is now certain; the atman is pure consciousness alone, so in what could imagination still find a foothold? Imagination needs two, one who imagines and a thing imagined, and now there are no longer two. In this certainty he counts them off: the body, heaven and hell, bondage and release, and fear, all of it is mere imagination, and one whose nature is consciousness has no business with any of it. Worth noticing is that alongside “heaven and hell are also imagination” he says “moksha too is imagination,” and this reaches far past any easy unbelief.

And now the chapter comes to its final turn. Aho, even standing in a crowd Janaka sees no duality; the whole throng has become for him like an empty forest, so in what would he form attachment, in what would he take delight? The “other” is something the mind fashions, and in advaita, non-duality, the split of “me and the rest” simply collapses. At the end he uncovers the true root of his bondage: he is not the body, the body is not his, he is not the jiva (the individual soul), he is only consciousness; his one and only bond was this much, “the wish to live.” Here Chapter 2 comes to a close. Janaka has become that, and all the dialogue that follows is a long unfolding of this single recognition, where guru and disciple now speak as equals.