64अष्टावक्रगीता · Aṣṭāvakra Gītā

anonymous, c. 500–800 · translations by Swami Nityaswarupananda, Advaita Ashrama, 1940, and Thomas Byrom, The Heart of Awareness, Shambhala, 1990

Linked to 20 chapters: supports 10 · contradicts 12 · mechanism 1 · same claim 5 · pairing 2

Janaka, king of Mithilā, opens with three questions: how is knowledge got, how does liberation come, how is dispassion reached. The sage Aṣṭāvakra answers all three by denying that anything is got at all. You are not earth, water, fire, air or space, he says; you are the witness of these and awareness itself, and if you set the body aside and rest in awareness you are free this moment, not later. Bondage is nothing but the thought of bondage: one who holds himself free is free, one who holds himself bound stays bound. Desire is not an obstacle on the way to the world, it is the world, so there is nothing to renounce except wanting. And since you never acted, there is no practice that could make you free, and the attempt to meditate your way there is itself named as a chain. Two hundred and ninety-eight verses in twenty chapters hold that position without once retreating from it. The text is a dialogue only in form. Janaka asks in the first verse and then, from the second chapter on, speaks as a man who has already understood, so that the book is less an argument than a pair of voices saying the same thing from the two ends of it — the teacher who states the case and the pupil who reports what the case feels like from inside. The Sanskrit is plain, the metre the ordinary śloka of the epics, and the same half-dozen images come back so often that they work as a vocabulary: rope and snake, shell and silver, ocean and wave, gold and bangle, clay and pot, a jar of space inside the space outside it. Nityaswarupananda's word-by-word edition is the one to read for the literal sense and the commentary; Byrom's free verse is the one to read for the tone, which is nearer to song than to argument. The renderings below are made from the Sanskrit and are meant to be plain.

The text names no author and gives no date. Aṣṭāvakra is a character borrowed from the forest book of the Mahābhārata, where a boy corrects his father's recitation of the Vedas from inside the womb, is cursed to be born bent in eight places, and at twelve walks into Janaka's court to defeat the scholar Bandin who had drowned his father in debate. The name means eight bends. Brockington, who revised Byrom's translation, notes that this etymological legend explains a name that otherwise has no explanation, and that nothing in the later stories about Aṣṭāvakra helps at all with his role here. What the borrowing does is set the scene: a contest about brahman, at a court, between a king and a boy whose body is a joke. The moral the stories carry, that the most misshapen form is still filled with the same light, is the text's own claim in narrative form.

The three questions

Chapter 1 is the only sustained instruction in the book. Aṣṭāvakra speaks nineteen verses and does not speak at length again until the fifteenth chapter.

The second verse is the one concession to ordinary discipline in the whole text, and Byrom records that some commentators think it spurious for that reason. It does not read as an interruption so much as a floor: the poet is willing to name the virtues once, and then never again. By the third verse the method is already in place, and it is subtraction. The five elements make the body; the body is seen; what is seen is not the seer. Nityaswarupananda's note puts the consequence plainly, that we identify the self with the elements and become miserable, and that the self is the witness and eternally distinct from what it witnesses. The fourth verse adds the word the poet returns to more than any other: adhunā, now. Not after a life of practice, not at death, but at once.

Caste and the four stages of life go in the fifth verse, which is not a social claim but a consequence: whatever cannot be predicated of the witness carries no duty with it. The sixth removes merit and sin along with pleasure and pain, and the seventh names the single error the book will attack for three hundred verses — taking the seer to be one of the things seen. The eighth gives it an image. Egoism is a black snake, and its venom is the sentence ahaṃ kartā, I am the doer; the antidote is not an action but a conviction, nāhaṃ kartā, I am not the doer.

The rope and the snake enter at the tenth verse and never leave. The figure is older than this text and standard in Advaita: a coil of rope in bad light is taken for a snake, and the fear is real while it lasts, but the rope never became a snake and nothing has to be done to it when the snake goes. The eleventh verse is the most quoted line in the book and the one Nityaswarupananda calls the formula of escape. It is not a piece of encouragement. It is the claim that bondage has no cause outside the belief in it, which is why the text can treat the belief as the only thing to be removed.

Two verses apart the poet tells Janaka to meditate on the self and then tells him that meditating is his bondage. The contradiction is not an oversight and it is not resolved anywhere in the text; it is the shape of the whole book. Verse 13 uses paribhāvaya, turn it over, dwell on it, which is a movement of understanding; verse 15 attacks samādhi, the practice of absorption, on the ground that anyone who sits down to attain something has already granted that he lacks it. Nityaswarupananda's note is blunt: such attempts presuppose that we are bound, and while we go on thinking ourselves bound, freedom is impossible. The poet will return to this at least a dozen times, and it is the position for which the book is either loved or thought irresponsible.

The chapter closes on two images that do different work. The mirror holds an appearance that occupies no space and leaves no mark, and Nityaswarupananda reads it as superimposition. The jar is the other move: the space inside a jar is not a portion of space, and nothing is done to it when the jar breaks. Byrom notes that readers have long disagreed about which of the two the nineteenth verse intends, and prefers the reading that makes it a statement of pervasion rather than of illusion. The text is content to leave both standing.

Adoration to myself

The second chapter is Janaka's, twenty-five verses of it, and nothing in the text prepares for the speed of the turn. He was asking how knowledge is got; one chapter later he is describing what it is like to have it.

Chapter 1 is addressed throughout to a second person: you are not earth, you are the witness, be happy. Chapter 2 says the same things in the first person and does not leave it again. Nothing has been added between the two, the predicates are the same words, and nothing is claimed to have happened except that a description has become a report. Janaka's first word is aho, an exclamation that runs through the chapter, and his verb for the years before it is viḍambita, made a fool of rather than punished.

The images arrive in a run, and they are not decoration. Each states the same relation: an appearance that has no material of its own borrows the material of what it appears in. Water, thread, juice, and later clay and gold, are all the same argument said five ways, and the modern term for it is the one Nityaswarupananda uses, material cause. Verse 3 contains the book's most modest word about how any of this happened. Aṣṭāvakra gave no method, and Janaka reports that it came kutaścit kauśalāt, by some skill or other, which Byrom renders as a gift and which is as close as the text ever comes to admitting that it cannot say how.

Four verses of self-adoration in a row are the hardest passage in the book for a reader raised on the idea that humility is a virtue. Byrom is careful about it: this is spiritual rapture and austere discrimination speaking with one voice, and next to the litanies of conventional devotion it can sound inflated. It is not praise of Janaka. It is praise of what is common to Janaka and everything else, offered by the one place from which such praise is not a boast.

The fifteenth verse takes apart the arrangement that every theory of knowledge depends on: knower, known, and the act of knowing. Nityaswarupananda's note is exact about why this matters — we take ourselves to be the first of the three, and the position of the text is that we are not a member of the triad but the ground it appears on. The sixteenth names duality itself as the disease, which is the reason the book keeps refusing remedies: a remedy is a second thing.

The wilderness of verse 21 is not loneliness. Nityaswarupananda glosses it as the aloneness of one who is in a crowd and conscious only of the one. The ocean enters here and will carry the rest of the book: the mind is a wind, worlds are waves, the separate self is a merchant whose ship is the world, and his cargo is his own action. Byrom points out that the ocean and the wave may have come to Advaita from Aśvaghoṣa, an early Mahāyāna teacher, and that the same figure recurs in chapters 6, 7 and 15.

The test, and the four ways

Aṣṭāvakra's reply to all this is to doubt it. Chapters 3 and 4 test the pupil; 5 to 8 give him four ways of dissolving the world and then a fifth position from which none of them is needed.

Chapter 3: the anomalies

The eight verses of the test are the most unexpected pages in the book, because the poet who says there is nothing to do spends them listing what a man who has understood should no longer be doing. Nityaswarupananda's note draws the line exactly where it belongs: verses 1 to 8 describe the half-hearted aspirant, and from verse 9 the mind and conduct of the one who knows are described. The last of the eight is the sharpest — a man may want freedom and be afraid of it, and the commentary supplies the reason, that he is afraid of losing what he has.

Verse 11 makes the claim the chapter has been working towards. A man who has stopped finding the world interesting has nothing left for death to take. The word for the world here is māyāmātram, illusion and nothing besides, and the loss of curiosity, vigatakautuka, is given as a consequence of seeing rather than as a discipline to be kept up. Verse 12 adds the harder case, the man whose hopes have failed and who wants nothing even so.

Verse 10 gives the book its most usable sentence. The great soul watches his own body act as if it were somebody else's, and the point the commentary draws from it is that praise and blame attach to conduct, conduct is bodily, and a man for whom bodily action is somebody else's is out of the reach of both.

Chapter 4: the game

The yogi of verse 2 is not elated to stand where Indra and the gods are wretched to stand outside, and Nityaswarupananda gives the reason: elation belongs to what is unaccustomed, and this is what he has always been. Verse 3 supplies the mechanism of the chapter in one image. Smoke appears to stain the sky and does not touch it, and merit and demerit stand in that relation to the man who knows: apparent contact, and no contact at all.

The fourth verse is the text's licence and its scandal. Nityaswarupananda spends most of a page making sure it is not read as permission, and adds the sentence that has to be added: the one who knows does not stoop to evil, because the tendencies that would produce it are gone before the state is reached. The image he gives for it is Ramakrishna's, that an expert dancer never puts a foot wrong.

Chapters 5 to 8: four ways, and then none

Four verses, four refrains, four routes to the same place, and the commentary sets them out as a list: be unattached; see the world as the same reality as the self; see it as illusory; and remain unmoved by anything inner or outer. Any one of them will do, which is the first sign that the text does not think of itself as prescribing a method.

Chapter 6 withdraws chapter 5. Dissolving was the instruction one page earlier; here even dissolving is refused, because the wish to dissolve the world is still a verdict against it. Nityaswarupananda's gloss is Ramakrishna's staircase: until you have reached the roof you treat the stairs as something other than the roof, and when you have reached it you find the stairs were made of the same material. Byrom adds that the refrain of holding and letting go echoes Gauḍapāda, whose asparśa yoga the poet is refining.

Indrajāla, the conjuror's show of verse 5, is the last of the chapter's names for the world, after the ship, the wave and the thing merely imagined. It settles what the others leave open. A conjuror's trick is not a mistake about what is there; it is a performance that goes on while it is watched and takes nothing from the watcher. The question in the second half of the verse follows from it: there is nowhere in such a thing for acceptance or refusal to get a hold.

Chapter 8 is four verses long and is the definition the whole book rests on. Bondage and liberation are not states of the world, nor stages of a career, nor rewards; they are the presence or absence of a movement in the mind, and the movement is desire in its two directions, wanting and refusing. Nothing is said about how long it takes, because on this definition duration does not enter: the mind either is moving that way at this moment or it is not.

Desire alone is the world

Chapters 9 to 14 alternate: Aṣṭāvakra on detachment, quiet and understanding; Janaka on what all this has done to him. The verses grow shorter and more epigrammatic, and the argument stops advancing and starts circling.

Chapters 9 to 11: detachment, quiet, understanding

Verse 2 says what kind of man the chapter is addressed to, and it is a narrow class: one whose wish to live, to enjoy and to know has gone out from watching how people carry on. Nityaswarupananda notes the two ways of arriving there. Some read the hollowness of the world off the suffering of others; the rest get the lesson only by going in and finding out. The first verse asks for indifference and, in the same line, for no observance to be kept.

The eighth verse of chapter 9 is the hinge of the middle of the book, and Byrom's note on the term it turns on is worth having. Vāsanā, which translators usually give as desires, is closer to impressions left by past experience, habits of mind, the grooves that make wanting automatic. On that reading the instruction is not to renounce the world, which would be one more transaction with it, but to renounce the habit, after which the world stops presenting itself as something to be renounced. The last verse of chapter 10 supplies the tone the poet reaches for when he is impatient. Stop, and then adya, today.

Every verse of chapter 11 begins from a certainty and ends in a change of state, and the Sanskrit marks it with the same word each time, niścayī, one who has settled it. The claim is not that thinking these things will produce the state; it is that the state and the certainty are the same event. Nityaswarupananda's note on verse 5 is the practical one in the chapter: suffering comes and is inevitable, and it is by dwelling on it that we make it misery.

Chapters 12 to 14: the pupil reports

Chapter 12 is Janaka's account of what dropped away and in what order: body, then speech, then thought. The seventh verse is the argument against meditation stated as cleanly as the text ever states it. To think about what is beyond thought is to make a shape in the mind, and the shape is not the thing. The commentary insists that the state indicated is higher than contemplation and not lower, which is the distinction the book depends on and the one its critics say it cannot police.

Chapter 14 describes the same man from outside and names the state in the negative: kṣīṇasaṃsmaraṇa, one whose recollections are worn out. The commentary is precise about what the word covers, the life of the senses, the pairs of opposites, and the store of past action that would otherwise produce another birth. What is left is a mind empty by nature rather than emptied by an exercise, which thinks of things only by inattention and is awake in the way a sleeping man is awake.

The loincloth is a good example of how the poet argues by degrees. A man who owns one garment is still a man who owns something, and owning is not the trouble; wanting is. Chapter 13 makes contentment a condition of knowledge rather than a reward for it, and Byrom marks the refrain: happiness is not what the poet promises at the end but what he tells the reader to begin with.

The clear space of awareness

Chapter 15 is the second sustained instruction and the one most often anthologised. Nityaswarupananda calls it unsurpassed in the book for its language and its teaching, and it is where the doctrine reaches its furthest point.

The second verse is the definition of chapter 8 restated in six words, and the half-line after it, yathecchasi tathā kuru, now do as you please, is the same line Krishna uses at the end of the Bhagavad Gītā when he has finished and leaves Arjuna to decide. Here it arrives in the middle. The third verse is the honest one: the poet knows what his teaching does to a competent man, and knows why competent men keep away from it.

The first half of verse 6 has appeared once already, at 3.5, where it was used against Janaka: strange that a man who has known the self in all and all in the self should go on saying mine. Here the same words are an instruction. A near neighbour of the line stands in the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā. What the poet does with it is his own, for from the same seeing he draws no conduct at all, only the dropping of the two words I and mine.

The eighth verse is the only place where the poet asks for faith, and he asks twice in the same line. It is not faith in a person or a doctrine to be verified later; the commentary reads it as the teacher pressing the point when the pupil cannot yet believe that the description applies to him.

The fifteenth verse cancels the two sentences that Advaita practice is usually built out of. So'ham asmi, I am that, and neti neti, not this, not this, are the affirmative and negative repetitions of the tradition; the poet calls both distinctions and drops them. The sixteenth is the furthest the text goes, and Nityaswarupananda pauses to consider whether it commits the author to the doctrine that only one subject exists, and decides it is better read as speech from the absolute standpoint. Read either way it leaves no second party anywhere, including the god who was still standing three verses earlier.

Chapters 16 and 17: forget, and the portrait begins

The third verse of chapter 16 is the proposition on which the book stakes everything. Striving is the cause of unhappiness, not its cure, and nobody knows it because striving is what we do when we are unhappy. Byrom draws the practical distinction the verse needs and the text never quite draws itself: what the poet attacks is not practice but a strenuous indolence, the habit of substituting effort for understanding. The fourth verse is the joke that goes with it. The master idler finds blinking an imposition, and he is the only happy man in the book.

Verse 1 is the concession the book keeps making and then withdrawing: the fruit of practice is named alongside the fruit of knowledge, and Byrom's note takes it to mean that practice may be abandoned only after it has been done. Verse 16 is where the portrait turns severe. Compassion and humility go the way of pride and cruelty, because all four are still qualifications of a person, and the poet has just written the person out.

The knower

Chapter 18 is a hundred verses, a third of the text, and the description of the man who is free while still alive. Nityaswarupananda compares it to the eighteenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, a summing-up, and observes that the language could only come from someone who had lived through it. It is also where every objection to the book gets its answer, and where the answers are hardest to tell apart from evasions.

The chapter opens with the book's only salutation, and it is offered not to a teacher or a god but to whatever it is at whose dawning delusion becomes like a dream. Verse 2 states the exchange the rest of the chapter will refuse: a man gets enjoyments by getting things, and cannot be happy without giving all of them up. Nityaswarupananda sets Bhartṛhari's list beside it, in which enjoyment carries the fear of disease, wealth the fear of kings, beauty the fear of age, and the body the fear of death.

The thirteenth verse carries the doctrine that makes the rest of the chapter possible. Actions go on after knowledge because the body is already in motion, driven by what the tradition calls prārabdha, the portion of past action that produced this life and has to run out. The one who knows is not doing them. Nityaswarupananda is careful to say that the explanation belongs to the observer and not to the man described: from where he stands there is no body and no residue of action to work out.

The sixteenth verse is the finest piece of reasoning in the text. The sentence ahaṃ brahmāsmi, I am brahman, belongs to a man who has seen brahman, which means it belongs to a man for whom there are still two things, himself and what he has seen. The sentence is therefore evidence that the work is not finished. Nothing replaces it, because the state it points at has nobody left in it to say anything. The dry leaf of verse 21 is the image the chapter is remembered for, and the wind is not fate but habit: the momentum of impressions already laid down.

Six verses in a row set the fool against the wise man, and they are the text's argument against effortful practice put six ways. Wanting a state is evidence of not having it and is therefore a way of keeping it away; the one who has it never wanted it. Stated so, the position is airtight and useless, and the text knows this, because sixty verses later it says the opposite about the same man.

The forty-second verse is the one place where the poet pushes off from Buddhism by name of doctrine if not of school. Byrom reads it as a rejection of the Madhyamaka position: the one who knows asserts neither the existence nor the emptiness of the self. Verses 45 and 46 are the book's best pair of images and its clearest statement of what it thinks the senses are. Tigers, to a frightened man, and elephants who cannot get away, to a man with nothing to take from him. And verse 75, twenty-nine verses later, says the thing the whole chapter has been denying: drop the practice and the desires come straight back.

The eightieth verse withdraws the chapter's own subject. Jīvanmukti, liberation while living, has been described for eighty verses and is now denied along with heaven and hell, because it too is a state and states belong to somebody. The ninety-fourth takes the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep, which the Upaniṣads use as the standard analysis of a person, and empties all three at once. The chapter ends not on an achievement but on an absence of preference: the crowd and the forest are the two places a man might go to become something, and he goes to neither.

Chapters 19 and 20: the last word is Janaka's

The nineteenth chapter is eight verses of a single surgical image. The knowledge of the truth is a pair of pincers, and what it draws out of the heart is a thorn, one opinion after another; doubts and arguments are treated as a foreign body and not as steps towards anything. Verse 5 disposes in half a line of the analysis the Upaniṣads use for a person. Waking, dream and deep sleep go, and turīya, the fourth, the name the tradition gives to what is left when the three are seen through, goes with them.

The last two chapters are a single figure of speech repeated forty times: kva, where. Byrom notes that the Sanskrit asks where rather than what, which makes the questions locative rather than definitional — not what is bondage, but where would you put it. The list is exhaustive on purpose. The three ends of life go, then the four states, then the elements and the senses, then scripture and self-knowledge, then bondage and liberation, then liberation while living and liberation at death, then knower and known and knowing. Nityaswarupananda's note on verse 20.4 is the sharpest thing in his commentary: the author is refuting the very idea of liberation while living, which everywhere else in Vedānta is the goal, because it presupposes both life and bondage.

The last verses take away the terms in which the removing has been described. Distraction and concentration go together in verse 9, and dullness with its opposite; verse 10 removes the pair that the whole of Vedānta is written in, the relative and what transcends it. Verse 11 is the one that costs most. Jīva and brahman, the separate creature and the absolute, are the two ends of the identity the tradition exists to teach, and both are asked where they are.

The thirteenth verse dissolves the two people who have been speaking. Once teacher and pupil have gone, the text has removed its own occasion, and the fourteenth stops. Byrom takes the final compound of the chapter, śivasya me, which can be read adjectivally as of me who am blessed, and renders it as a declaration: I am Shiva. He gives his reason — the poet was almost certainly a Śaiva, and at this point had nothing left to compromise.

Since about the eighth century

Nobody knows when the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā was written or by whom, and the estimates span more than a thousand years. Indian editors have generally placed it beside the Bhagavad Gītā or just before it, in the fourth or fifth century BCE, on the strength of the shared title, the shared metre and the shared setting; Nityaswarupananda takes that line, calls the work older than Gauḍapāda's Kārikās, and finds in it the germs of the later extreme theories. Brockington, writing in 1990, rejects the dating outright. The Advaita of the text has undergone a long development and must at the least be later than Śaṅkara; doctrinally it sits close to Sadānanda's Vedāntasāra and Vidyāraṇya's Jīvanmuktiviveka of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the way it borrows an epic setting to carry a monistic argument it resembles the Yogavāsiṣṭha, itself a twelfth- or thirteenth-century recasting of the Rāmāyaṇa. Byrom, who translated it, split the difference and guessed at either the eighth century, under a follower of Śaṅkara, or the fourteenth, during the revival of his teaching. The text gives no purchase for anything better. Sanskrit after Pāṇini changed too little to be dated by its language, and the poet took care to leave no trace of himself; the one thing that can be said with confidence about the man who wrote under the name Aṣṭāvakra is that he was not Aṣṭāvakra.

What the text did have was an afterlife. Manuscripts are scattered through European libraries — nine in the Bodleian alone, two of them older by their dates than any Giussani or Hauschild used — and a collation of them shows almost no variation in the verses, and some in the titles given to the chapters. Carlo Giussani published the first translation into a European language at Florence in 1868, from three manuscripts at Tübingen and St Petersburg; Richard Hauschild's German edition followed in 1967. The modern Indian life of the book begins in Ramakrishna's room at Dakshineswar. Nityaswarupananda's introduction records that Ramakrishna kept a copy there and would ask the young Narendranath to read it aloud; after a verse or two Narendra would refuse, saying it was a sin to call man God, and Ramakrishna would answer that he was not asking him to believe it, only to read it. The man who refused became Vivekananda, and the argument of the book — that the self and brahman are not two, and that this is not a doctrine to be believed but a fact to be seen — became the argument he took abroad. Brockington notes the tradition independently and treats it as the measure of the text's standing among modern Vedāntins. Sri Ramanasramam has kept it in print, in an edition whose Sanskrit verses are reproduced in Ramana Maharshi's own handwriting. Byrom received his copy from his own teacher, and reports that Neem Karoli Baba called it "the purest of scriptures."

Nityaswarupananda's translation, serialised month by month in Prabuddha Bharata from 1929 to 1931 and then revised for Advaita Ashrama's book edition, is still the one to start from: every verse in Sanskrit, then word by word, then in English, then a note that says what a reader of Advaita would need to be told. Byrom's version of 1990 goes the other way. He removed the dialogue entirely on the ground that there is no real drama in it and only one voice is ever heard, broke the ślokas into short free-verse lines, and produced something that reads as lyric rather than instruction; Brockington, who emended it throughout, called the result the first English version to catch the freshness and directness of the original, and wrote in the same foreword that the text has with good reason been called "the outpourings of a realized individual." Read together the two translations bracket the problem the book presents. Taken as instruction it is close to unusable, since every instruction it gives is withdrawn within a few verses; taken as report it is unanswerable, because a report is not obliged to tell anyone how to get there. What has survived best is the definition in chapter 8 — bondage is the mind wanting and refusing, liberation is the mind doing neither — which does not depend on the metaphysics around it, and the observation of 16.3 that people are unhappy because they exert themselves and do not know it. What has aged is the certainty that the world is nothing, which the text asserts and never argues, and the portrait of the sage in chapter 18, which is drawn with such completeness that it leaves a reader no way to tell the free man from the merely idle one. The poet saw that objection coming and answered it twice, once by saying that only those like him can know his state, and once, at verse 75, by warning that whoever drops his practice without having arrived will be taken straight back by his desires.