The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 6: Consciousness

Janaka speaks, and the first picture he reaches for is the one Ashtavakra closed his first chapter with, the pot and the space around it. The king picks it up and turns it toward himself. I am endless like space, he says, and the world of nature is like a pot. Space has no edge; the pot is a thing made of clay, standing in the space without altering it by a hair. That alone is knowledge. A man who knows himself as the space has no quarrel with the pot. There is no reason to throw it away, no reason to take it up and no reason to melt it down, since the clay wall never divided anything. So of this world there is no renouncing, no accepting and no dissolving. Every tradition fills with two kinds of seeker, the ones who give the world up and the ones who take it on, and the two argue. Janaka stands outside the argument. The world is a pot, and it may stay on the shelf.

The second picture is the ocean and the wave, and this too came from Ashtavakra, in the third chapter, when he asked the king why a man in whom the universe flashes like waves on the sea runs about like a man in want. Janaka hands it back as a settled fact. I am like the great ocean, and the whole manifold world is like a wave. A wave is seawater held in a shape and nothing more, so there is nothing in it to renounce, nothing to accept and nothing to dissolve. A seeker imagines that one day the wave will merge into the ocean. Janaka says there is no dissolving either, because the wave was never separate; what never began to be apart cannot begin to end. A wave rising is the sea moving, and a wave falling is the sea moving. The king is speaking of his own world, and nothing in it has to end for the sea to be the sea.

The third picture is the mother-of-pearl and the silver. A shell lying in the sun shines like silver, and a man bends to pick it up. Ashtavakra used the picture in the third chapter for the greed that comes from not knowing the shell; Janaka takes it for himself. I am like the mother-of-pearl, he says, and the universe is the silver imagined on it. Nobody has ever renounced imagined silver, or picked it up, or melted it down. If people take the shell for silver the error is theirs, and the shell is unchanged by it. The world takes you for one thing and then another, wise, foolish, good, bad, and all of it is silver on a shell. The shell stays exactly what it was. What you are rests on no one’s opinion.

In the fourth verse Janaka gives up pictures. I am in all beings, and all beings are in me, and both halves are true at once. For one who is in everything and in whom everything is, the world is no object standing opposite him that could be renounced, accepted or dissolved. Four verses, one declaration, and the hall has heard its king tell his teacher that there is nothing to dissolve, with no disrespect anywhere in it. In the seventh chapter Janaka goes on speaking, the comparisons fall away, and what is left is the ocean itself, saying how it feels about the ship on it. On that the sixth chapter closes.