First to step forward is the avadhuta in his plainest form, a form that carries no display and no hoard. On his body a quilt made from rags left along the road, beneath his feet the path that holds no division of merit and demerit, and for shelter some empty house where he stays naked, sunk in the evenness within. His conduct runs neither on a hunger for merit nor on a fear of sin, because what flows inside him lies beyond both. Then a question rises. For one in whom the very difference between what is worth attaining and what is not has dissolved, no target is left; he has nothing remaining to prove. Debate needs two sides, and where the one reality alone stands there is no second side. So what debate can there be for the avadhuta.

Now that same evenness keeps deepening. The avadhuta is loosed from the noose of hope, and though he stands outside the rules of ritual cleanliness and conduct, he is complete, because his purity rises on its own from within, not from any outward procedure. He keeps no contempt for the rules; he has simply moved past discipline to the place where discipline has become his very nature. So he is stripped of everything and at peace, himself the form of reality, pure and stainless. For one who rests in this effortless reality, nothing is left inside to be weighed. What talk, then, of body and bodilessness, what talk of passion and dispassion. No one fashioned this reality; it stands self-established, spotless, unmoving, vast as the open sky, present in its own natural shape.

Where someone reaches the reality, how can the difference between form and the formless hold. To make something an object means to set it out before you and hold it apart; the atman, the self, can never be made an object this way, because it is the very knower and the very known, and both dissolve into that supreme sky-like expanse. Here the symbol of the hamsa rises. The hamsa, the swan, is an ancient sign for the self, built in the Upanishad from अहं स, meaning we are That. This hamsa is unbroken and unstained like the sky, wholly pure in its essence, without a mark. On that which is sky-like, the disturbances of bondage and liberation cannot so much as land. So what difference of separate and inseparable can stand there.

The pure and stainless reality alone is everything, unbroken and clear as the sky. Color here means the tinting of the mind, its shifting states; the tints of joy and grief, of attraction and aversion, keep rising and falling in the mind, yet the atman stays untouched by color. Where no color ever settles, where is the question of company and solitude. Right here the avadhuta’s very gait speaks nonduality. Slow and easy means unhurried, at leisure, with no rush in him. He walks neither like a strict yogi nor like a man of pleasure; a yogi free of union and separation, an enjoyer free of indulgence and abstinence, and both melt into one effortless motion, while effortless bliss keeps flowing with every step he takes.

The next shloka leaves you astonished. Though he stays forever paired with both knowing and not-knowing, the avadhuta is free. In the higher nonduality, once the seeker moves past the pairs, standing with both and standing outside both come to the same thing; there the lines between yogi and enjoyment, between liberation and bondage, are erased. He is effortless, free of the dust of passion, an enjoyer of the pure, stainless evenness. Even so, a question returns. Attachment means being joined, being stuck; the seeker’s mind clings somewhere or other, to some thought, some object, some state. But the avadhuta is neither joined to any pair nor cut loose from it, because within him no pair ever forms. So what talk of essence and non-essence, when the reality is even-flavored and vast as the sky.

Forever stripped of all and yet complete, stripped of all reality and yet free. Meditation too is a means, an instrument; but in the final state no means is needed at all. A means serves only as far as the goal appears distant and apart. In the avadhuta no difference between goal and means survives, so meditating and not meditating become the same, and even life and death cease to be questions there. Then, in a single glance, the whole world springs open. Indrajala is the scene a magician conjures, plain before the eyes yet holding no substance of its own; this whole world rises and shows itself just so, like a mirage over the desert. The only real one is Shiva, who is never carved into pieces and never bound into any shape. The maya-doctrine of Advaita Vedanta gathers here into a single shloka.

Now Dattatreya speaks, for once, on behalf of us all. From dharma all the way to moksha, we are wholly without craving, empty of desire. A vipashchit is one who reads the shastras and is called wise, yet even such a scholar stays tangled in imagining; dharma, artha, kama, and moksha, the four aims of human life, prove in the end to be things imagined. So how do these learned ones go on imagining passion and dispassion. The truly desireless one is he who holds within himself no craving for any of these. And right here the single signature of these four chapters, of four and five and six and seven, comes back. Where neither attaining nor not-attaining remains, no rule of meter holds either. The avadhuta sunk in evenness gives no thought to the rules of poetry; his speech pours out on its own from the welling up of reality, and that very outpouring he sets down, calling it his own raving.