The Ashtavakra Gita · Chapter 9: Detachment

Ashtavakra opens with the one question that defeats every mind that tries to answer it. Done and not done, this pair that churns the mind day and night, whose was it ever, and when did it fall quiet? Behind every ‘I have done it’ stands a fresh ‘there is still this left to do,’ a wheel that never stops turning. Once you know this, you slide toward renunciation on your own, bound by no vow. Seekers make resolutions: I will do this, I will not do that. Ashtavakra says there is no need for a resolution at all; let nirveda arrive on its own, and the vows keep themselves.

Then Ashtavakra calls him son with affection and tells him a rare thing. For some rare and blessed man, merely watching the world’s scramble cools all three cravings: the hunger to live, the hunger to enjoy, and the thirst to know. Go into the marketplace and watch the people, every one of them running, harried, worn thin; watching this alone, an easy recognition settles into a blessed mind, that this whole rush is for the sake of what. And the wish to know grows still as well, because for the one who knows there is nothing left to learn.

Everything you see, Ashtavakra says, is impermanent, stained by the three torments, hollow, blameworthy, and fit to be let go; once this is settled, the seeker grows calm. The three torments are these: the spiritual one that rises from within yourself (adhyatmika), the material one that comes from others (adhibhautika), and the elemental one that arrives from nature’s blows (adhidaivika). Any pleasure you find will be stained by one of these three; there is no clean pleasure anywhere. Think of any occasion that pleases you and look for the torment mixed into it, for somewhere in every joy a grip stays hidden.

Now Ashtavakra breaks the illusion that some day will come when the opposites fall quiet on their own. What time is that, what age, in which people carry no opposites? Childhood has its own, youth its own, old age its own; every age brings its own struggle along. So the seeker who overlooks them and lives in whatever comes reaches fulfillment. This overlooking carries no contempt; it is simply giving up the tangle with them and settling into whatever stands before you. Stop waiting for the opposites to end, and start learning right now to leave them unseen.

A seeker often keeps hunting for a single doctrine, thinking this one is the truth. But Ashtavakra points to a subtle thing. The doctrines of the great sages, the saints, the yogis differ so widely from one another; the man on whom nirveda descends at the sight of this, why would he not grow calm? Every guru, every teacher, every text is saying something else, and at first glance this looks bewildering. Yet this very bewilderment is the greatest teaching, because it tells you the answer waits inside your own experience, in no doctrine outside.

Here the mark of a guru grows clearer too. The one who brings a true knowing of consciousness, and by the method of nirveda and equanimity ferries you across the world, is that not the true guru? Teaching ritual alone does not make a guru; the true guru awakens awareness and carries you past this coming and going by the road of equanimity. And this method differs for every student: for one through story, for another through meditation, for another through direct self-inquiry; the right guru chooses exactly the means that fits each student.

Now Ashtavakra gives a way of seeing that can free you in that very instant. See the transformations of the elements, all these countless forms the five elements take, in their true nature as elements alone, and in that instant you slip free of bondage and rest in your own nature. Look at a table: it is wood, the wood is a tree, the tree is a sum of earth and water and sunlight, in the end only an arrangement of the five elements. Turn this same seeing on your own body; do not take it for ‘I,’ understand it as a brief settling of elements, and then carry this same seeing to everything else.

And at the end Ashtavakra sets down the axis of the whole chapter. The desires themselves are the world; knowing this, let go of them all; the world is renounced through the renunciation of desire alone, and then live however you happen to live today. The outer world is only a result; the real weave is the desires seated within, and these are the root. You need change nothing outside; what must move is what sits inside you. This is the central note of the chapter: nirveda descends through understanding alone, asking no force and no strain; recognize the world, the opposites, the clash of doctrines, and impermanence, and dispassion will come on its own.