Textual context
The fourth chapter is called Sarvatra, everywhere, and its six verses describe a man for whom the Self has stopped being located anywhere in particular. The Bhagavad Gita says it in one line, the Self set in all beings and all beings in the Self (6.29), and the Katha Upanishad in another, smaller than the smallest and greater than the greatest (1.2.20). The Atman is everywhere, and it has no address.
Mathematics arrived at something like it late. Georg Cantor (1845 to 1918) showed that an infinite set can be matched point for point with one of its own parts, the whole fully present inside a piece of itself, and his colleagues needed a generation to accept it.
Everywhere
Everywhere · 6 shlokas
Janaka answers the examination of the third chapter without once defending himself. Six short verses, each about a man he never names as himself: the steady knower, the yogi, the great soul, the rare one. The court hears a king describe someone else and understands who is meant.
Sarvatra means everywhere. The claim under the chapter is the one its fourth verse makes outright, that this whole world is the Self alone; the thirteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita paints the same claim as a being with hands and feet, eyes and mouths on every side. Janaka was a name the kings of Videha carried as a title. Sita’s father in the Ramayana and the king whom Yajnavalkya instructs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad are two of the line, and the tradition does not say which of them sat before Ashtavakra.
So far
Ashtavakra has drawn the steady one and left the portrait in the king’s hands. Janaka answers him now, and his answer is about where the Self is found: everywhere.
Ashtavakra has just asked whether a man who knows the Self can still take pleasure in gathering wealth, and the whole hall heard him ask it of a king. Janaka does not plead his case. He speaks of a third person, the steady one who knows the Self, and lets the court decide whether the description fits. The knower plays at the game of enjoyment the way a child plays in a courtyard, with nothing staked. The deluded, who haul samsara along like oxen under a yoke, do the same things with their whole weight behind them, and the likeness ends at the skin. For the second verse Janaka reaches above the court. There is a state that Indra and every god with him long for, and the longing makes them wretched, because a god has everything except the one thing. The yogi who stands in that very state feels no elation at standing there. Nothing was reached, and a man does not celebrate arriving home in his own house.
Shlokas 1 · 2
Ah, the steady man who knows the Self, playing at the game of enjoyment, has nothing in common with the deluded beasts of burden who haul the world along.
Oh, the yogi who stands in the state that Indra and all the gods long for in their wretchedness feels no elation there.
Janaka gives the court an image of sky and smoke. Smoke rises from a sacrificial fire until the sky seems full of it, and the sky has no part in it; when the smoke scatters the sky is as it was, because it never held anything. So merit and sin, punya and papa, the two columns in which a king’s priests keep his account, do not touch the knower within. They happen in the body and mind he watches, and the one who watches takes no color from either. The fourth verse has the sound of a challenge. A great soul has known that this whole world is the Self alone; he lives as things come, with no plan of his own, and Janaka asks who could restrain such a man. There is no one left in him to receive the prohibition, and nowhere he is trying to go.
Shlokas 3 · 4
That knower is not touched within by merit or by sin, just as space, though it may seem to be, is never touched by smoke.
Who could restrain the great soul who has known this whole world to be the Self alone, and who lives as things come?
For the last pair Janaka widens the view until it takes in every living thing. From Brahma at the top of creation down to a clump of grass, the beings of the world come in four kinds, born from the womb, the egg, moisture and the seed, and across all of them one being alone can give up both desire and aversion: the one who knows. Wanting and refusing are the two hands with which everything alive holds on to the world, and the wise one has let go with both. Then Janaka lowers his voice. Rare is the man who knows the Self as non-dual and as the lord of the world. He does what he knows; there is no gap between the knowing and the living in which fear could stand, so he has no fear from any quarter, and Janaka says this in a hall where a king’s fears arrive from every quarter at once. He has drawn the steady one as closely as Ashtavakra did, and he has drawn him from inside.
Shlokas 5 · 6
Among the four kinds of beings, from Brahma down to a blade of grass, only the wise one has the power to give up both desire and aversion.
Rare is the one who knows the Self as non-dual and as the lord of the world. He does what he knows, and has no fear from any quarter.