Aṣṭāvakra Gītā

Ramakrishna, the Bengali mystic, kept a copy of this book in his room, and his own order tells how he had the young Narendranath Datta, later Swami Vivekananda, read it aloud to him; Narendra, then close to the reforming Brahmo Samaj, would stop after a verse or two and say it was a sin to call a human being God. The book is a dialogue in Sanskrit verse, a gītā or "song", of twenty chapters, and it is not a commentary on anything: it argues directly that only the self is real and that the self is already free. King Janaka of Videha asks how knowledge, freedom and detachment are won. The answer comes at once: he is not the body or the elements but the witness of them, pure awareness, and if he rests in that awareness he is free now. Freedom needs no practice, and the text says so outright: sitting in meditation is itself the king's bondage, and the one who takes himself to be free is free. The world is mistaken for real as mother-of-pearl is mistaken for silver or a rope for a snake. Janaka answers with verses of astonishment at his own boundless self, and Aṣṭāvakra then tests him, asking how a man who knows this can still enjoy acquiring wealth. The tradition ascribes the work to Aṣṭāvakra, the sage of a Mahābhārata story who as a boy won a debate at Janaka's court. The text itself is anonymous, and scholars disagree widely on its date: J. L. Brockington, a Sanskritist at Edinburgh, places it either in the eighth century, among the followers of Śaṅkara, who founded the non-dualist school of Advaita Vedānta, or in the fourteenth, when his teaching revived. The text here is the Sanskrit verses alone. Lala Baij Nath published the first English translation in 1907, and Swami Nityaswarupananda's, serialised by the Ramakrishna Order's journal Prabuddha Bharata from 1929, has been reprinted by the order's Advaita Ashrama since 1940.