The guru draws one clean distinction, between the man of pride and the sage. Whoever ties himself to the gross body and takes pride in it, to him come pleasure, come pain, come the auspicious and the inauspicious, because he reads every collision as landing on himself. But the sage in whom that very bond has been shattered, who is seated in the true Self, how would any fruit, auspicious or inauspicious, ever touch him. To make this clear, the guru lifts an example from the sky. During an eclipse we say the sun has been seized; yet the sun is never actually seized, the moon simply moves between and covers it from our eye. The sun stays exactly as it was. This same illusion runs over the knower as well.

In the same way, foolish people take that finest knower of Brahman, freed from the body and every other bond, to be an embodied creature, because all they see is the appearance of a body. The knower’s relation to the body is like a snake and its cast-off skin. The snake sheds an old skin and moves on, and that skin lies where it fell, stirred this way and that by the wind, but it is no longer the snake. The knower’s body too is just such an old shell, kept twitching somehow by the breath of life (prana), while the real ‘I’ has already moved on.

Where the body will go, how it will drift, the knower does not decide. As a current of water carries a piece of wood over high ground and low, so the current of prarabdha (ripened past karma) carries the body through the experiences that fall due in their time, and it simply flows along without resistance. From the outside he looks like a worldly man moving among enjoyments, yet within he sits silent like the accomplished witness, like that pin at the center of a potter’s wheel that stays still while the whole wheel turns. He conceives nothing, he wants nothing.

He neither yokes the senses to their objects nor labors to pull them away. He rests in pure witnessing, and does not glance for even an instant at the fruit of any act, because his mind is drunk on the thick rasa of his own bliss. This is an intoxication, and a true one, and inside this rapture the senses go on moving and stopping by themselves. Then the guru offers a short sentence that reaches very high. Whoever drops the game of ‘this is to be gained, that is not to be gained’ and comes to rest in the Self alone is Shiva made visible, that same finest knower of Brahman. The liberated man is never apart from God, which is among the highest convictions of Vedanta.

Now the guru tells the whole story of living liberation (jivanmukti) and bodiless liberation (videha-mukti) in a single breath. The finest knower of Brahman is forever free while still alive, fulfilled, with nothing left to do; and when at last the limiting adjunct falls away, he becomes Brahman itself and dissolves completely into the nondual Brahman. Two stages, one unbroken journey. To make this clear, the guru raises an image from the stage. An actor on the stage wears now the costume of a king, now that of a beggar; costume or none, the man inside stays the same. The knower’s body too is only a costume, one that can change and can vanish, while the real ‘I’ is forever Brahman, and nothing else.

Now the worry about leaving the body dissolves entirely. When a leaf snaps from the tree and falls, let it fall wherever it will, who cares; the tree stays exactly as it was. In the same way, the body of a monk who has become Brahman may drop anywhere, anyhow, and it brings no concern, because his real burning is already done, in the fire of consciousness. And that sage, seated forever in the true-Self-Brahman as full, nondual bliss, needs to wait for no fitting place or time to set down this lump of skin and flesh and waste. This dry description of the body is deliberate, a final jolt to attachment; and let this ball of a body fall anywhere, at any time, for the sage it is all one and the same.

Here comes one of the most memorable, most direct statements in the Vivekachudamani. The falling away of the body is not liberation, and liberation lies neither in the renunciant’s staff nor in his water-pot; the real liberation is the untying of the knot of ignorance lodged in the heart, that and that alone is liberation. And once that knot is loosed, whether the body stays or goes hardly matters. Ordinary people say that dying on the bank of the Ganga is auspicious and dying elsewhere is not. But whether the leaf falls into a small canal, into a river, into a shrine of Shiva, or into a crowded square, what auspicious or inauspicious thing is that to the tree. The knower is the tree, the body his leaf; his death has no good or bad place.

The guru deepens this image of the tree. Leaves, flowers, and fruit perish, and in the same way the body, the senses, the vital breath, and the intellect meet their destruction; but not one’s own atman (the self), which is of the nature of pure being and shaped of bliss, and which endures forever like the tree. Then the guru brings in the famous word from the Brihadaranyaka, prajnana-ghana, a solid mass of awareness on every side, and this is the true mark of the atman. When shruti (revealed scripture) speaks of destruction, that destruction belongs to the limiting adjunct and never to the atman; first it discusses the adjunct, then the ending of that same adjunct.

The guru repeats this same reassurance through the mouth of Yajnavalkya. अविनाशी वा अरे अयम् आत्मा, O Maitreyi, this atman is imperishable; this shruti proclaims the atman’s imperishability even in the midst of decaying, changeful things on every side. And he ties it to a down-to-earth example. Stone, tree, grass, grain, and chaff, all of these, burning and burning in fire, become in the end nothing but earth, returning to their original element. In the same way the body, the senses, the vital breath, and the mind, this entire visible world, burns in the fire of knowledge and merges into the supreme Self. All these things that look separate are in the end the atman alone.

Now the guru gives images of merging. The opposing darkness is nothing in itself, only a lack of light; the moment the sun’s brilliance arrives it dissolves, and then there is no longer one darkness and one light, no two things, only light. In the same way the whole visible world dissolves into Brahman. And that memorable image of the pot: when the pot breaks, where does the pot’s space go, nowhere; it was always space itself, only it looked hemmed in between the pot’s walls. The walls gone, the space stands clear. When the limiting adjunct dissolves, the knower of Brahman is Brahman itself, distinct and clear. Nothing is subtracted, only the enclosure is lifted.

Then three everyday images. Pour milk into milk, oil into oil, water into water, and they blend into one; who can say this is that milk and that is this. The union of the Self-knowing sage with the Self is just like that; it was milk-in-milk from the start, and now a single milk appears, since there were never two at all. Having thus reached videha-kaivalya, pure being, the unbroken state of Brahman, this monk does not return again. He has stepped out of the wheel of birth and death; liberation is final and never temporary.

And the guru gives the reason with a lovely piece of reasoning. For one whose body of ignorance has burned away in the knowledge of oneness with the true Self, who has become Brahman itself, how could there be any fresh arising out of Brahman; Brahman is not born from itself, it stands beyond birth and death. Then a subtle point arrives. Bondage and liberation are both fashioned by maya, and in one’s own Self they truly do not exist at all, exactly as the appearing and the departing of a snake on an inert coil of rope is no real event. In the atman, bondage and liberation too are appearances of this kind; they seem to be there, yet nothing about them is real.

The guru tests this same point on the touchstone of reason. A covering, meaning the presence of a lid, is what gets called bondage, and its absence is liberation; but there is no covering on Brahman at all, because there exists no second thing to cover it, and so it is forever uncovered. And if you were to grant it some covering, that covering would become a second thing, and nonduality would break; shruti does not tolerate duality. Foolish people falsely lay this property of the intellect onto the Self, just as, casting the covering of a cloud-blocked eye onto the sun, they say the sun is covered, while the sun stands open the whole time. The atman is nondual, unattached, awareness by nature, the imperishable.

The guru grows subtler still. The thought ‘it is’ and the thought ‘it is not’, both of these are properties of the intellect and not of the eternal thing; the eternal Brahman neither is nor is not, it lies beyond them both. The instant you say ‘Brahman is’, you drop it into a division of is-and-is-not, while it comes before all such thoughts. This is why bondage and liberation are fashioned by maya and are not in the atman. That which is partless, actionless, at peace, faultless, untainted, the one supreme Reality without a second, what imagining can there be in it, any more than in the sky. What will you imagine in the sky, which is empty; the atman too is beyond every attribute and every imagining in just that way.

And now comes the most startling, most exalted declaration in the Vivekachudamani, one in which the language of the Mandukya Upanishad and the Gaudapada Karika resounds. No cessation, no arising; no one bound, no seeker; no aspirant, no liberated one, this is the ultimate reality (paramarthata). Six negations, each cutting away one more assumption: no ending, no beginning, no bondage that ever was, no one performing a discipline, no one wanting liberation, no one liberated. All of this shows up only at the level of everyday dealings; at the level of the ultimate, nothing ever happened, no one ever was, no one ever went anywhere. This is the last word of Vedanta. And the guru adds his closing sentence: this final settled doctrine, the crest-jewel of all the Vedas, this supreme and most secret mystery, I have shown to you today, to you whose intellect is free of the taint of the Kali age and released from desire, having again and again held you, like my own son, to be a true seeker of liberation. A teaching like this goes to one’s own son, ripened slowly and taught with care, and stays out of reach of any passing inquirer.

Now the story reaches its final turn. Hearing the guru’s words in this way, bowing low in humility, the disciple received his permission and went, his bondage undone. He listened, he bowed, and he left only when the guru told him to go, which is the beautiful rule of the guru-disciple tradition. But the disciple went, and the guru? With his mind sunk in the ocean of everlasting bliss, he wandered on without pause, making the whole earth holy everywhere he went. A liberated guru does not stop; he keeps flowing like a stream of seva (service), going everywhere, making everything holy.

Now the text tells its own address, whom it was composed for. In this way, through the dialogue of teacher and disciple, the nature of the Self has been set out, so that seekers of liberation may come to realization with ease, for this very end. The form of a dialogue was chosen precisely so that the seeker reaches understanding easily; a work of philosophy, it still keeps its tone plain. And the guru says, let this beneficial teaching be received by those whose faults of mind have all been removed by proper discipline, who are turned away from worldly pleasure, whose minds are at peace, who are monks in love with shruti, and who long for liberation. Five tests; a text like this belongs to the ripened seeker alone.

And now the final shloka, with an image full of poetry. On the road of samsara people wander exhausted, scorched by the heat that rises from the burning sun’s rays, aching for water, lost in a desert, and the water there? Only a mirage. Yet very close at hand, extremely near, stands an ocean of nectar, needing only someone to point it out. This is what the Vivekachudamani does; it shows that joy-giving nondual Brahman, that ocean of nectar standing near. And the final words, शंकर-भारती विजयते, निर्वाण-संदायिनी; the nirvana-giving voice of Shankara stands victorious. The Vivekachudamani ends here, 580 shlokas, one whole journey, from the very first question to the closing nirvana-sandayini. ओम् तत् सत्।