Osho, the Indian spiritual teacher, gave ninety-one discourses on the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā and called it the Mahāgītā, the great song. Earlier, according to the Ramakrishna Order, the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna kept a copy in his room and had the young Narendranath Datta, later Swami Vivekananda, read it aloud to him. Narendranath would stop after a verse or two and protest that it was a sin to call a human being God. He was objecting to the book's central claim. The book is a dialogue in 298 Sanskrit verses between a teacher and King Janaka of Videha, and it holds that freedom is not reached by any practice at all: the self is already pure awareness, the witness of body and world, and already free.
The first answer the king receives sounds conventional: if he wants freedom, he should shun the objects of the senses like poison and take forgiveness, sincerity, compassion, contentment and truth like nectar. From the next verse on, the teaching changes. He is not earth, water or fire, the teacher says, but the witness of them, and if he rests in awareness he is free now. Even sitting in meditation is his bondage, and the one who takes himself to be free is free. The world is a mistake of the kind that sees silver in mother-of-pearl or a snake in a rope. Later the teacher tells him that he may recite many scriptures or hear them recited and will still not be at ease until he has forgotten everything. Janaka answers in verses of astonishment at his own boundless self, and Aṣṭāvakra tests him: how can a man who knows this still enjoy acquiring wealth? In the last chapter the pupil speaks: Janaka asks where instruction is, or scripture, pupil or teacher, for one who is without limits and at peace.
The teacher's name and his tie to Janaka come from the Mahābhārata, the great Sanskrit epic, where the sage Lomaśa tells his story to the Pāṇḍava brothers, the epic's heroes, in their forest exile. Aṣṭāvakra, whose name means "bent in eight places", was born crooked because, while still in the womb, he corrected his father Kahoḍa's recitation of the Veda, and Kahoḍa cursed him. As a boy he went to Janaka's court and defeated Vandin, a debater who had drowned the men he beat, Kahoḍa among them; his father was restored, and when the boy bathed in the river Samaṅgā his limbs became straight. The Rāmāyaṇa, the other great epic, remembers him as the son who redeemed Kahoḍa. The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā borrows the pair from that story: the boy who silenced the king's debater becomes the king's teacher.
The book itself is anonymous, and tradition's ascription is all that ties it to the sage. Scholars disagree widely on its date. J. L. Brockington, a Sanskritist at Edinburgh, offers two dates: the eighth century CE, among the followers of Śaṅkara, the founding teacher of Advaita Vedānta, the non-dualist school; or the fourteenth, during a revival of his teaching. Radhakamal Mukerjee, an Indian scholar who translated it, put it before the common era. Whatever its date, it teaches the Advaita doctrine that only the one self is real, in an unusually radical form. The sage of the epic has no historical date at all; the years on this page follow the earlier of Brockington's two dates for the book and are a filing estimate, not a lifetime.