Dispassion

Verse 10.1: Vihāya vairiṇaṃ kāmam arthaṃ cānartha-saṃkulam. Leaving behind that enemy, kāma, desire; and artha, wealth, which is crowded with calamity. Dharmam apy etayor hetum. And even dharma, which is the cause of those two. Sarvatra ādaraṃ kuru. Everywhere place your respect, your steady attention. The verb ādaraṃ kuru is unusually warm. He is not asking you to despise these things. He is asking you to redirect your ādara, your respectful attention, away from them. The bracketing of dharma with kāma and artha as something to be left behind is striking; dharma is what produces both pleasure and wealth, so it is the deeper root, and Aṣṭāvakra names the root, not just the fruit.

Verse 10.2: Svapnendrajālavat paśya dināni trīṇi paṃca vā. See them like a dream, like a magician's net: lasting three days, or five. Mitra-kṣetra-dhanāgāra-dāra-dāyādi-sampadaḥ. Friends, fields, wealth, house, wives, heirs, riches. The list is the householder's whole world. Trīṇi paṃca vā is the chapter's most casual phrase. Three days or five. He is not lecturing about impermanence. He is pricing it.

Verse 10.3: Yatra yatra bhavet tṛṣṇā saṃsāraṃ viddhi tatra vai. Wherever there is tṛṣṇā, craving: there, know, is saṃsāra. Prauḍha-vairāgyam āśritya vītatṛṣṇaḥ sukhī bhava. Resorting to ripe dispassion, with tṛṣṇā dissolved, be happy. Prauḍha-vairāgya, ripe or mature vairāgya, distinguishes Aṣṭāvakra's vairāgya from the brittle, performative renunciation of beginners. The fruit must be ripe before it falls. The imperative sukhī bhava, be happy, repeated through the text, is his recurring instruction.

Verse 10.4: Tṛṣṇā-mātrātmako bandhas tan-nāśo mokṣa ucyate. Bondage is made of nothing but tṛṣṇā. Its destruction is called liberation. Bhavāsaṃsakti-mātreṇa prāpti-tuṣṭir muhur muhuḥ. By mere non-clinging to becoming, joy in the already-attained, again and again. Bhavāsaṃsakti: non-attachment to bhava, becoming. The verse ends with muhur muhuḥ, again and again, a phrase that carries the rhythm of breath. This tuṣṭi, contentment, is not a one-time event. It is a continuous note.

Verse 10.5 is the chapter's philosophically nuclear verse. Tvam ekaś cetanaḥ śuddho jaḍaṃ viśvam asat tathā. You are one, conscious, pure. The world is insentient, unreal. Avidyāpi na kiñcit sā. Even avidyā, ignorance, is not anything. Kā bubhutsā tathāpi te. So what is this hunger to know, in you? This is Aṣṭāvakra at his most fearless. Even the standard Vedānta scaffolding, in which avidyā is the cause of bondage and its removal is liberation, is dismantled. Nothing has ever happened. The hunger to know is itself one more tṛṣṇā.

Verse 10.6 is the chapter's most direct address. Rājyaṃ sutāḥ kalatrāṇi śarīrāṇi sukhāni ca. Kingdoms, sons, wives, bodies, pleasures. Saṃsaktasyāpi naṣṭāni tava janmani janmani. For one as attached as you, these have been lost, lifetime after lifetime. Janmani janmani. The phrase is heavy. He is reminding Janaka, and through Janaka the reader, that the play has been running a long time, and the same losses have been suffered before.

Verse 10.7: Alam arthena kāmena sukṛtena api karmaṇā. Enough of wealth, enough of desire, enough even of meritorious action. Ebhyaḥ saṃsāra-kāntāre na viśrāntam abhūn manaḥ. From these, in the wilderness that is saṃsāra, the mind has not come to rest. Kāntāra, wilderness, is a vivid word for saṃsāra: not a swamp, not a prison, but a tangled forest you cannot find your way out of. And the mind, after all this work, has not yet found a place to sit.

Verse 10.8 is the closing sentence of the chapter. Kṛtaṃ na kati janmāni kāyena manasā girā. For how many lifetimes have you not already done it: with body, with mind, with speech. Duḥkham āyāsadaṃ karma tad adyāpy uparamyatām. This karma, full of suffering, full of strain: let it cease, even today. Uparamyatām, the passive imperative, is the gentlest verb in the chapter. Let it stop. Not "you must stop." Let it stop. The grammar lifts the burden of even the stopping.

Suka, the son of Vyāsa, is the figure tradition associates most closely with the kind of vairāgya Aṣṭāvakra describes in this chapter. The stories say Suka was born already realized; he did not need to renounce because he had nothing to renounce. He walked out of his father's hermitage without clothes and without looking back, and Vyāsa, calling after him in grief, received no reply. When the trees and rivers answered Vyāsa instead of Suka, the message was clear. Suka had passed beyond the field in which the distinction between son and father, householder and renunciate, even mattered. He is the embodied form of 10.8: in him, the karma of body, mind, and speech had already ceased. There was nothing to give up because there was no one to give it.

In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa it is Suka who narrates the entire text to King Parīkṣit during the last seven days of the king's life. Suka was the right messenger because, in him, even the urgency of liberation had stopped striving. He spoke not because he wanted Parīkṣit liberated. He spoke because Parīkṣit asked. Yathāprāpta-vartī. What comes, comes.

Raikva of the cart, the obscure sage in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, is a less famous but precise echo. King Jānaśruti, a powerful and proud ruler, hears that Raikva has wisdom beyond his own. He searches for him and finds him sitting under his own cart, scratching his sores. The king offers him gold, cattle, his own daughter. Raikva refuses, then accepts on the second offer, but only with a teaching that reduces the king's pride. Raikva's wealth is the wealth of vairāgya without austerity. He is not performing renunciation. He is just under his cart. The pomp of the king cannot touch him. This is prauḍha-vairāgya, ripe dispassion: not the unripe performance of giving things up, but the natural quietness of one for whom giving up never came up.

Kabīr, the weaver-mystic of fifteenth-century Banaras, lived this chapter from the householder's side. He stayed at his loom. He stayed with his wife and children. He went on weaving. He did not retreat to a forest, did not take a monastic name, did not stop his daily work. And yet his songs are full of the chapter's verdict. He sings, in many dohas, that the householder who has done the inner work is freer than the sannyāsin who has only changed clothes. He sings of piya, the beloved, who is found at the loom and not at the temple. He sings of the anhad nād, the unstruck sound, which arrives when tṛṣṇā falls and the body is forgotten without being abandoned. Kabīr is the avratī Aṣṭāvakra calls for in 9.1 and 10.1: renouncing without taking the vow of a renouncer. The vow would be one more attachment. He kept weaving.

Kabīr's pithy line, often translated, says: "Where there is craving, there is the world; where craving is gone, there is liberation." This is Aṣṭāvakra Gītā 10.3 in vernacular Hindavi. The destination has not been imported. It has been recognized. The two voices, the Sanskrit and the weaver's, meet at vītatṛṣṇa, beyond craving.

Aṣṭāvakra's vairāgya presupposes the unbroken Self, the cit that was never bound. Buddhist vairāgya presupposes the absence of any abiding Self. Christian renunciation presupposes the will of a Creator who must be obeyed. The destination, from inside, may have a similar stillness. The architecture of why and how is not the same. Read each on its own ground. Do not flatten.