Ashtavakra: life, works and verified quotes

Biography

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A name that is a wound

Aṣṭāvakra means "the one who is crooked in eight places". Few sages of ancient India carry a deformity in their name, and none turns it so effectively into an argument: the whole tradition gathered around him repeats that the body is not the measure of the sage, that age is not the measure of knowledge and that the self is not the figure one sees. Two levels, however, which devotion tends to merge, must be kept apart from the outset. On the one hand there is the character of the Sanskrit epic, whose fullest story survives in the Mahābhārata; on the other, the philosophical poem that circulates under his name, the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā or Aṣṭāvakra Saṃhitā, a text by an unknown author that no ancient passage connects with that character. No date, place or testimony allows Aṣṭāvakra to be treated as a historical figure: he is a figure of tradition.

The child who corrected his father

The canonical story fills three chapters of the Āraṇyakaparvan (3.132–134 in the critical edition), where the sage Lomaśa tells it to Yudhiṣṭhira during the Pāṇḍavas' pilgrimage. Kahoḍa, a disciple of the Vedic teacher Uddālaka, marries Sujātā, his teacher's daughter. While she is pregnant, the child speaks from the womb and reproaches his father because, although he recites all night long, he does not recite correctly. Humiliated before his pupils, Kahoḍa curses him: he will be born crooked in eight places. Shortly afterwards, driven by poverty, Kahoḍa goes to the court of King Janaka of Videha in search of wealth; there he is defeated in debate by the disputant Bandin (or Vandin) and, by the rule of the contest, thrown into the water. Uddālaka orders that the child must not know, and Aṣṭāvakra grows up believing that his grandfather is his father and that Śvetaketu, his uncle of the same age, is his brother.

The contest of numbers

At twelve, when Śvetaketu pulls him off Uddālaka's lap with the words "this is not your father's lap", Aṣṭāvakra learns the truth and sets out with his uncle for Janaka's sacrifice. The gatekeeper bars his way because only old and learned brahmins may enter, and the boy answers with a maxim the poem would make famous: a man is not old because his head is grey, but because he knows, and the sages did not found merit on years, grey hair, wealth or kinsmen. Before the king he challenges Bandin. The duel is a singular piece of Sanskrit literature: each contestant must improvise verses on the numbers from one to thirteen, and when Bandin manages only the first half of the stanza on thirteen, Aṣṭāvakra completes it and wins. The loser then reveals that he is a son of the god Varuṇa and that he had been sending the drowned brahmins to a twelve-year sacrifice beneath the waters; he returns them, Kahoḍa among them, and the father tells his son to bathe in the river Samaṅgā, from which he emerges with straightened limbs.

Other traces in the epics and the Purāṇas

The name reappears elsewhere. Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa uses it as the emblem of the son who redeems his father: in the book of the war (6.119.17 in the vulgate numbering), the dead Daśaratha tells Rāma that he has been saved by him as the brahmin Kahoḍa was saved by Aṣṭāvakra. The Anuśāsanaparvan of the Mahābhārata (sections 19–21 in Ganguli's translation) tells of another trial: to win the hand of Suprabhā, daughter of the sage Vadānya, Aṣṭāvakra travels to the North and resists the advances of an old woman who turns out to be the deity of that region, Diś. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa (5.38) instead ascribes to him a gesture of anger: some apsarases who had been praising him laughed when they saw him rise from the water, misshapen, and he cursed them to fall into the hands of robbers, which, according to Vyāsa, explains the abduction of Kṛṣṇa's wives after the god's death.

An undated poem

The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā is something else. It consists of some three hundred verses in twenty chapters cast as a dialogue between Janaka and Aṣṭāvakra, although the dialogue soon dissolves into an almost continuous declaration of identity with consciousness. Neither the text nor the epic links the boy of the contest with the teacher of the poem; tradition does, through the name and the figure of Janaka. Proposed dates diverge enormously. Radhakamal Mukerjee, in a study published posthumously in 1971, placed it around the fifth to fourth centuries BCE; J. L. Brockington, in his foreword to Thomas Byrom's translation (1990), regards it as the work of an Advaitin later than Śaṅkara, from the eighth or the fourteenth century, at a time of renewal of that school. Richard Hauschild's critical edition (Berlin, 1967) remains the reference philological study.

What the text says

The poem opens with three questions from the king: how knowledge is attained, how liberation, how dispassion. The answer is abrupt: you are not earth, water, fire, air or space, but the conscious witness of them all; if you detach yourself from the body and rest in consciousness, you will be happy and free right now. The text prescribes no rites, caste duties or stages of life, and goes so far as to say that bondage consists precisely in still practising concentration in order to reach what one already is. Its famous maxim, "he who considers himself free is free, he who considers himself bound is bound: as one thinks, so one becomes", sums up a teaching that excludes all gradualness. Chapter XVIII, the longest, describes the one liberated while living, indifferent to success and failure, who acts without feeling himself the doer.

Modern readers

The work reached European readers in the nineteenth century: in 1912 the Italian Silvio Pagani recalled the prose translation by Carlo Giussani published in Angelo De Gubernatis's Rivista Orientale in 1867–1868, which he set in verse; in 1904 Lala Baij Nath published the first known English version. In modern India it became a bedside text of the Vedantic movement: Vivekananda quoted its verse on freedom as one's own opinion of oneself, and Ramana Maharshi recalled the story of Aṣṭāvakra and Janaka before his visitors and copied the poem's Sanskrit text by hand, which Sri Ramanasramam has reproduced in facsimile alongside Swami Nityaswarupananda's translation (1940). Osho devoted a long series of Hindi discourses to it, published as Ashtavakra Mahageeta, and the versions by Thomas Byrom (1990) and John Richards, who released his into the public domain in 1994, have made it one of the most widely read texts of contemporary non-duality.

Sources: Mahābhārata, Āraṇyakaparvan 3.132–134 (ed. crítica de Poona: V. S. Sukthankar et al., Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1942). Traducción inglesa: Kisari Mohan Ganguli (trad.), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, vol. «Vana Parva», Calcuta, Bharata Press (Pratap Chandra Roy), 1884, secciones CXXXII–CXXXIV (Tirtha-yatra Parva), pp. 396–407. · Mahābhārata, Anuśāsanaparvan, secciones XIX–XXI de la traducción de Kisari Mohan Ganguli (The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, vol. «Anusasana Parva», Calcuta, Pratap Chandra Roy, 1883–1896): diálogo de Aṣṭāvakra con la dama Diś. · Wilson, Horace Hayman (trad.). The Vishnu Purana: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition. Londres: Oriental Translation Fund / John Murray, 1840, libro V, cap. XXXVIII, pp. 617–618. · Byrom, Thomas (trad.). The Heart of Awareness: A Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita. Prólogo de J. L. Brockington. Boston y Londres: Shambhala, 1990. ISBN 9780877735748. · Hauschild, Richard (ed. y trad.). Die Aṣṭāvakra-Gītā. Berlín: Akademie-Verlag, 1967 (reimpresión De Gruyter, ISBN 9783112742679).

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

300 BCE27384514181990

c. 300 BCE

The story in the Āraṇyakaparvan

The Mahābhārata, composed and expanded over several centuries around the turn of the era, includes in its forest book (3.132–134) the story of Aṣṭāvakra, Kahoḍa and Bandin. The date is only an order of magnitude: the epic does not allow individual episodes to be dated.

ProbableMahābhārata, Āraṇyakaparvan 3.132–134 (ed. crítica de Poona: V. S. Sukthankar et al., Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1942). Traducción inglesa: Kisari Mohan Ganguli (trad.), The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, vol. «Vana Parva», Calcuta, Bharata Press (Pratap Chandra Roy), 1884, secciones CXXXII–CXXXIV (Tirtha-yatra Parva), pp. 396–407.

c. 300 BCE
The story in the Āraṇyakaparvan
The Mahābhārata, composed and expanded over several centuries around the turn of the era, includes in its forest book (3.132–134) the story of Aṣṭāvakra, Kahoḍa and Bandin. The date is only an order of magnitude: the epic does not allow individual episodes to be dated.
Probable
VIII century
Composition of the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (hypothesis)
J. L. Brockington ascribes the poem to a follower of Śaṅkara in the eighth or the fourteenth century. Other authors propose much earlier dates (Mukerjee: fifth to fourth centuries BCE); there is no consensus.
Disputed
1840
Wilson translates the Viṣṇu Purāṇa
Horace Hayman Wilson publishes in London his translation of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, which includes (5.38) Aṣṭāvakra's curse on the apsarases who laughed at his body.
Documented
c. 1867
First Italian translation
Carlo Giussani publishes a prose translation of the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā in Angelo De Gubernatis's Rivista Orientale (Milan, 1867–1868), as Silvio Pagani recalled in 1912.
Documented
1884
Ganguli translates the forest book
Kisari Mohan Ganguli publishes in Calcutta the English translation of the Vana Parva, with the full story of the contest of numbers.
Documented
1904
First English translation of the poem
Lala Baij Nath publishes The Ashtavakra Gita: A Treatise on Adwaita Philosophy, with notes and an introduction.
Documented
1912
Pagani's verse version
Silvio Pagani publishes in Milan (Sonzogno) an Italian version in hendecasyllables based on Giussani's prose.
Documented
February 6, 1937
Ramana Maharshi comments on the story of Aṣṭāvakra and Janaka
In talk 350 Ramana explains to a devotee that the point of the story of Aṣṭāvakra and Janaka is the disciple's complete surrender, and warns that "the anecdotes differ in different books".
Documented
1940
Nityaswarupananda's translation
Advaita Ashrama publishes Swami Nityaswarupananda's Aṣṭāvakra Saṃhitā, with word-by-word translation and commentary; it would become the reference version of the Ramakrishna movement.
Documented
1967
Hauschild's critical edition
Richard Hauschild publishes in Berlin the edition and German translation Die Aṣṭāvakra-Gītā.
Documented
1990
The Heart of Awareness
Shambhala publishes Thomas Byrom's free rendering with a foreword by J. L. Brockington, one of the most widely read in the West.
Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

Traditional attribution ·

Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (The Song of Aṣṭāvakra)

अष्टावक्रगीता (Aṣṭāvakragītā), también अष्टावक्रसंहिता (Aṣṭāvakrasaṃhitā)

A Sanskrit poem of some three hundred verses in twenty chapters, cast as a dialogue between King Janaka of Mithilā and Aṣṭāvakra. After the king's opening questions on knowledge, liberation and dispassion, the teacher asserts that the self is the conscious witness, formless and actionless, and that bondage is merely a mistaken identification with body and mind. Janaka answers with songs of wonder at his own nature, and the text culminates in a long chapter (XVIII) on the one liberated while living. It dispenses with rites, duties and stages of life, and even regards the practice of concentration itself as bondage.

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16 editions

Ashtavakra

The number debate with Bandin (Mahābhārata 3.132–134)

The Conscious Library

Traditional attribution

The number debate with Bandin (Mahābhārata 3.132–134)

अष्टावक्रीय (Aṣṭāvakrīya), Mahābhārata 3.132–134

Aṣṭāvakra's answers to the gatekeeper, to King Janaka and to the disputant Bandin. They include the maxim on true old age, which lies in knowledge and not in grey hair, and the tournament of improvised stanzas on the numbers from one to thirteen, in which each figure evokes ritual, cosmological and philosophical groups (two friends, Indra and Agni; twelve months of the year; thirteen metres). Commentators read in it a controversy between doctrines about the unity of the Self.

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2 editions

Complete works (3)

Ashtavakra
Dialogue with the Lady of the North
The Conscious Library
Dialogue with the Lady of the North

Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

You are not earth, nor water, nor fire, nor air, nor space. For liberation, know yourself as the witness of all these, whose form is consciousness.

न पृथ्वी न जलं नाग्निर्न वायुर्द्यौर्न वा भवान्। एषां साक्षिणमात्मानं चिद्रूपं विद्धि मुक्तये॥

VerifiedAṣṭāvakra Gītā 1.3 (texto sánscrito de Wikisource); versiones española e inglesa del investigador

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Last words

There are no verifiable records of their last words.

There is no record of his death or of his last words. The epic and Purāṇic texts present him in isolated episodes (his birth, the contest, his marriage, the curse on the apsarases) and none narrates his end.

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What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
The Absolute is the witnessing consciousness, one, full and actionless
An impersonal AbsoluteStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā does not speak of a God to be addressed but of a consciousness that the disciple already is. In the first chapter the teacher describes the Self as witness, all-pervading, full, one, free, pure consciousness and actionless (1.12), and compares it to space, which is at once inside and outside a jar: so the eternal brahman is in the multitude of beings (1.20). The whole world appears in it like the snake in the rope (1.10) or the waves in the ocean (2.4), adding nothing to it and taking nothing away. The text does not expressly deny a personal God, but grants him no role: the ultimate is not someone who creates or judges, but the conscious ground of all experience, identical with the one who asks.
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Who am I? Is there a true self?
You are not the elements: you are the witness, whose form is consciousness
The Self is the AbsoluteStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā answers the question from its third verse: the disciple is not earth, water, fire, air or space, but the witness of them all, whose form is consciousness (1.3). That witness belongs to no caste or stage of life, neither acts nor enjoys (1.5–1.6), and is one with the brahman that is in all beings as space is in jars (1.20). Bondage consists in seeing the seer as if it were another, that is, in taking oneself for an object (1.7). That is why the poem does not propose building a higher self, but recognising what one already is: whoever considers himself free is free, and whoever considers himself bound is bound (1.11).
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Why do we suffer?
The bite of the serpent of ego: believing oneself the doer
Ignorance of what we areStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā places the root of suffering in a mistaken identification. The disciple, says the teacher, has been bitten by the great black serpent of the pride of thinking «I am the doer», and the antidote is to drink the nectar of the conviction «I am not the doer» (1.8). Bondage consists in taking the seer for another, that is, for an object (1.7), and in identifying for a long time with the body (1.14). Desire, aversion, pleasure and pain belong to the mind, not to the Self; whoever separates from the body and rests in consciousness is happy and serene right now (1.4). Suffering is neither punishment nor trial: it is the price of not knowing what one is.
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What happens after death?
The witness is neither born nor dies; the sage neither craves life nor fears death
What I am is never born and never diesStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā does not describe what happens after death, because for it death affects something the disciple is not. From the first chapter it asks him to recognise himself as the witness of the elements (1.3) and to stop identifying with the body, the rope by which he has long been bound (1.14). Body and world arise and dissolve in consciousness like waves in the ocean (2.4); consciousness neither comes nor goes. Chapter XVIII, devoted to one liberated in life, describes someone who neither desires life nor fears death, indifferent to pleasure and pain. The text neither discusses rebirth nor expressly denies it: it simply leaves it on the side of what is not the Self.
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How is liberation or salvation attained?
You are already free: your bondage is that you keep practising concentration
Through direct knowledgeStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā understands liberation as recognition, not achievement. The teacher asks Janaka to burn the forest of ignorance with the fire of the conviction «I am the one pure consciousness» (1.9), and assures him that if he rests in consciousness, separating from the body, he will be free right now (1.4). The most radical feature of the poem is its distrust of discipline: Janaka is already free, actionless and luminous, and his bondage consists precisely in continuing to practise concentration (1.15). Hence the text states that a disciple of pure mind reaches his goal through a mere instruction, while the other seeks all his life (15.1). In chapter II Janaka does indeed awaken at the first dialogue.
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Is a teacher necessary?
One instruction suffices for the ripe disciple; in the end there is no teacher or disciple
Helpful but not indispensableInferred from their doctrine
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā is a dialogue between teacher and disciple, and its very form grants a role to the sage's word: Janaka asks, Aṣṭāvakra answers, and in the second chapter the king declares that he has awakened. The text explains why: the disciple of pure mind reaches his goal through a mere instruction, while the other goes on seeking all his life (15.1). But the instruction conveys nothing the disciple does not already have; it only points to what he already is. Hence the poem distrusts learning (16.1) and, in its last chapter, lists among the things that no longer exist for the liberated one the scriptures, knowledge and the distinction between the one who teaches and the one who learns. The teacher is an occasion, not a condition.
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Is the world real?
The world appears through not knowing the Self, like the snake in the rope
Appearance over the one realityStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā treats the world as a superimposition on consciousness. It appears through not knowing the Self and ceases to appear when the Self is known, as the snake appears through not recognising the rope and vanishes once it is recognised (2.7). The poem also uses other classical Vedānta images: the silver seen in mother-of-pearl, the water of a mirage (2.9). But alongside them it offers a more conciliatory one: as waves, foam and bubbles are not different from water, the universe that has arisen from the Self is not different from it (2.4). The world is unreal as an independent reality and, at the same time, nothing but the Self appearing. That is why the liberated one need not flee it: it is enough not to take it for what it is not.
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What is love?
It does not speak of love: it describes the sage free from attachment and aversion
Did not address it
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā contains no teaching on love. Its vocabulary is that of detachment: desire and aversion belong to the mind, not to the Self (15.5), and the liberated one of chapter XVIII is indifferent to pleasure and pain, praise and blame, with neither affection nor hatred towards anything. It would be a mistake to read coldness there: the text describes someone who has stopped dividing the world into what is his and what is another's, and who acts without feeling himself the doer. But it does not call that state love, nor develop it as compassion towards others. If anything follows from its doctrine, it is that the sage's equanimity arises from seeing himself in all beings and all beings in himself (6.4).
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Are we free, or is everything determined?
Drink the nectar of the conviction «I am not the doer» and be happy
There is no doerStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā answers the question by displacing it. The problem is not whether the self chooses freely or is determined, but the very belief in a self that acts: the disciple has been bitten by the great black serpent of the pride of thinking «I am the doer», and the antidote is the nectar of the conviction «I am not the doer» (1.8). The Self is witness, actionless (1.12); merit and demerit, pleasure and pain, belong to the mind (1.6). Chapter XVIII describes the liberated one as someone who does what comes without feeling himself the author, gaining nothing by acting and losing nothing by not acting. The freedom that concerns the poem is not that of the will, but that of not being identified with any agent.
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Why meditate or pray?
Your bondage is precisely that you practise concentration
Meditation is not a techniqueStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā is one of the texts most critical of meditative practice in all Indian literature. In the first chapter the teacher tells Janaka that he is already free, actionless, self-luminous and stainless, and that his bondage consists precisely in continuing to practise concentration (samādhi) (1.15). The idea recurs throughout the poem: whoever strives to still the mind still presupposes a self that strives and a goal to be reached, and the sage neither meditates nor ceases to meditate. This is not a recommendation of laxity: what the text points out is that what is sought is not a produced state. All it asks is to rest in the consciousness one already is (1.4).
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Can reason know the ultimate?
Though you read and hear many scriptures, you will find no rest until you forget all
The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā distrusts study as much as practice. In chapter XVI the teacher tells Janaka that he may expound or hear many scriptures, again and again, but that he will not attain rest in himself until he forgets everything (16.1). Reason and learning belong to the mind, and what is sought is that to which the mind appears: the witness, which is not an object of the senses or of thought (1.5). The poem does not despise instruction —it is what awakens Janaka— but it understands it as a pointer that is exhausted once understood. In the last chapter, the liberated one no longer has any scripture or knowledge to defend.
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Withdraw from the world or transform it?
King or ascetic, it matters not: the liberated one acts without feeling the author
Contemplation in actionStated explicitly
The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā is a dialogue with a king, Janaka, whom tradition considers liberated without leaving his throne, and its answer to the question is consistent with that frame. Chapter XVIII describes the sage liberated in life as someone not distinguished by outward conduct: he may act or not act, live at court or in the forest, because he no longer feels himself the author of what he does. He neither seeks solitude nor flees it: in the fool, the poem observes, even abstention turns into activity, while in the sage activity itself bears the fruit of abstention (18.61). Nor is there in the text any programme for reforming the world: the sage's action happens, but pursues nothing. What changes is not where one lives, but who one believes is living.
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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

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