ASTAVAKRA GITA - 16, 17

XVI

Ashtavakra said:

1. My dearest, you may recite or listen to countless scriptures, but you will not be established within until you can forget everything.

2. You may, as a learned man, indulge in wealth, activity and meditation, but your mind will still long for that which is the cessation of desire, beyond all goals.

3. Everyone is in pain because of their own effort, but no one realises it. By just this very instruction, the lucky one attains tranquillity.

4. Happiness belongs to no one but that supremely lazy person for whom even opening and closing one’s eyes is a bother.

5. When the mind is freed from such pairs of opposites as ‘I have done this,’ and ‘I have not done that,’ it becomes indifferent to merit, wealth, sensuality and liberation.

6. One person is abstemious and is averse to the senses, another is greedy and attached to them, but he who is free from both taking and rejecting is neither abstemious nor greedy.

7. So long as desire, which is the state of lacking discrimination, remains, the sense of revulsion and attraction will remain; that is the root and branch of samsara.

8. Desire springs from usage, and aversion from abstension, but the wise person is free from the pairs of opposites like a child, and becomes established.

9. The passionate person wants to be rid of samsara so as to avoid pain, but the dispassionate person is without pain and feels no distress even in it.

10. One who is proud about even liberation or one’s own body, and feels them one’s own, is neither a seer or a mystic. Such a person is still just a sufferer.

11. If even Shiva, Vishnu or the lotus-born Brahma were your instructor, until you have forgotten everything you cannot be established within.


XVII

Ashtavakra said:

1. He who is content, with purified senses, and always enjoys solitude, has gained the fruit of knowledge and the fruit of the practice of union too.

2. The knower of truth is never distressed in this world, for the whole round world is full of himself alone.

3. None of the senses please a person who has found satisfaction within, just as grape leaves do not please the elephant that likes mango leaves.

4. The person who is not attached to the things he has enjoyed, and does not hanker after the things he has not enjoyed, such a person is hard to find.

5. Those who desire pleasure and those who desire liberation are both bound in samsara; the great-souled person who desires neither pleasure nor liberation is rare indeed.

6. It is only the noble minded who is free from attraction or repulsion to religion, wealth, sensuality, and life and death too.

7. Such a one feels no desire for the elimination of all this, nor anger at its continuing, so the lucky person lives happily with whatever sustenance presents itself.

8. Thus fulfilled through this knowledge, contented, the thinking-mind emptied, one lives happily just seeing when seeing, just hearing when hearing, just feeling when feeling, just smelling when smelling and just tasting when tasting.

9. In one for whom the ocean of samsara has dried up, there is neither attachment or aversion. Such a one’s gaze is vacant, behaviour purposeless, and senses never grappling.

10. Surely the supreme state is eveywhere for the liberated mind. Such a one is neither awake or asleep, and neither opens or closes the eyes.

11. The liberated one is resplendent everywhere, free from all desires. Everywhere such a one appears self-possessed and pure of heart.

12. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, speaking and walking about, the great-souled person who is freed from trying to achieve or avoid anything is free indeed.

13. The liberated person is free from desires everywhere. Such a one neither blames, praises, rejoices, is disappointed, gives nor takes.

14. When a great souled one is unperturbed in mind and self-possessed at either the sight of a mate eager with desire, or at fast-approaching death, that one is truly liberated.

15. There is no distinction between pleasure and pain, man and woman, success and failure for the wise person who looks on everything as equal.

16. There is no aggression or compassion, no pride or humility, no wonder or confusion for the person whose days of running about are over.

17. The liberated person is not averse to the senses and nor is he attached to them. He enjoys hinself continually with an unattached mind in both achievement and non-achievement.

18. One established in the absolute state with an empty mind does not know the alternatives of inner stillness and lack of inner stillness, and of good and evil.

19. Free of me and mine and of a sense of responsibility, aware that nothing exists, with all desires extinguished within, a person does not act even in acting.

20. One whose thinking mind is dissolved achieves the indescribable state and is free from the mental display of delusion, dream and ignorance.