यथासुखम्
Chapter 13
Yathāsukham · 7 verses
Chapter thirteen, *Yathāsukham*, is seven verses spoken by Janaka in praise of an ease that does not depend on circumstance. The chapter's refrain, *aham āse yathāsukham*, I rest as happiness happens, is one of the loveliest constructions in the entire Gītā. *Yathāsukham* is an adverb: as comfort arises, as ease comes, in the manner of happiness. Janaka is not saying he has secured happiness. He is saying he has stopped fighting the way it shows up. He gets what he gets, he loses what he loses, he sleeps when he sleeps, he wakes when he wakes, he acts when an action arises, and through all of this he is simply at rest. The chapter is about the happiness that does not require a particular outcome. It is the inner mood of someone who has discovered that no event in his life can disturb what he most fundamentally is. Where the previous chapter named what had ceased, this one names what arose in its place: an unforced, weather-proof ease.
Janaka speaks
अकिंचनभवं स्वास्थं कौपीनत्वेऽपि दुर्लभं। त्यागादाने विहायास्मादहमासे यथासुखम्
akiṃcanabhavaṃ svāsthaṃ kaupīnatve'pi durlabhaṃ tyāgādāne vihāyāsmādahamāse yathāsukham
The state of having nothing, the resting in oneself, is rare even in one who wears only a loincloth. So, abandoning both giving up and taking on, I rest as ease arises.
कुत्रापि खेदः कायस्य जिह्वा कुत्रापि खेद्यते। मनः कुत्रापि तत्त्यक्त्वा पुरुषार्थे स्थितः सुखम्
kutrāpi khedaḥ kāyasya jihvā kutrāpi khedyate manaḥ kutrāpi tattyaktvā puruṣārthe sthitaḥ sukham
Somewhere the body has its distress; somewhere the tongue finds difficulty; somewhere the mind has its weight. Setting all this in its place, established in the inner goal, I am at ease.
कृतं किमपि नैव स्याद् इति संचिन्त्य तत्त्वतः। यदा यत्कर्तुमायाति तत् कृत्वासे यथासुखम्
kṛtaṃ kimapi naiva syād iti saṃcintya tattvataḥ yadā yatkartumāyāti tat kṛtvāse yathāsukham
Having truly seen that nothing whatsoever is actually being done, when something arises to be done, I do it and rest as ease arises.
कर्मनैष्कर्म्यनिर्बन्धभावा देहस्थयोगिनः। संयोगायोगविरहादहमासे यथासुखम्
karmanaiṣkarmyanirbandhabhāvā dehasthayoginaḥ saṃyogāyogavirahādahamāse yathāsukham
Yogis still situated in the body have identities tied to action and to its deliberate absence. Free of both contact and non-contact, I rest as ease arises.
अर्थानर्थौ न मे स्थित्या गत्या न शयनेन वा। तिष्ठन् गच्छन् स्वपन् तस्मादहमासे यथासुखम्
arthānarthau na me sthityā gatyā na śayanena vā tiṣṭhan gacchan svapan tasmādahamāse yathāsukham
Gain and loss are not mine by standing, by going, or by lying down. Standing, going, sleeping, I rest as ease arises.
स्वपतो नास्ति मे हानिः सिद्धिर्यत्नवतो न वा। नाशोल्लासौ विहायास्मदहमासे यथासुखम्
svapato nāsti me hāniḥ siddhiryatnavato na vā nāśollāsau vihāyāsmadahamāse yathāsukham
Sleeping, I have no loss; striving, I have no gain either. Having set aside the rise and fall of expectation, I rest as ease arises.
सुखादिरूपा नियमं भावेष्वालोक्य भूरिशः। शुभाशुभे विहायास्मादहमासे यथासुखम्
sukhādirūpā niyamaṃ bhāveṣvālokya bhūriśaḥ śubhāśubhe vihāyāsmādahamāse yathāsukham
Having watched, many times over, that pleasure and the rest follow their own law in things, I have set aside the auspicious and the inauspicious, and I rest as ease arises.
The refrain aham āse yathāsukham is the spine of the chapter. Āse is from ās, to sit, to be, to remain. Yathā is as, in the manner of. Sukha is comfort, ease, happiness. Put together, it is: I remain as ease comes; I sit as comfort presents itself. It is not declarative happiness. It is something gentler: an unhurried, undefended way of being available to whatever the day brings.
Verse 13.1 sets the chapter's keynote with a strong claim. Akiṃcana-bhavaṃ svāsthaṃ, kaupīnatve api durlabhaṃ. The state of possessing nothing, akiṃcana-bhava, the resting in oneself, svāsthya, is hard to find even in one who wears only a loincloth. The kaupīna is the small cloth of the renouncer; Janaka points out that even renouncers, even those who have outwardly given up everything, rarely find this inner svāsthya. Tyāga-ādāne vihāya asmād. Therefore, having abandoned both giving up and taking on. Aham āse yathāsukham. I rest as ease arises. The verse silently dismantles the entire economy of having and not-having: the householder who has, the renouncer who has not, both can miss the svāsthya that does not depend on either.
Verse 13.2 identifies whose problem the various uneasinesses are. Kutrāpi khedaḥ kāyasya. Somewhere there is the body's distress. Jihvā kutrāpi khedyate. Somewhere the tongue is troubled. Manaḥ kutrāpi tat tyaktvā. The mind, somewhere, has its trouble. The Sanskrit is precise: each instrument has its own seat of trouble, kutrāpi, somewhere, located in its own field. Puruṣārthe sthitaḥ sukham. Established in the goal of life, I am at ease. The verse maps an anatomy of disturbance: the body's distress is the body's, the speech-organ's struggle is the speech-organ's, the mind's heaviness is the mind's. Janaka has stopped collapsing all of these into one I am suffering. Located in their proper places, the disturbances lose their grip on the puruṣa, the inner person.
Verse 13.3 moves into action. Kṛtaṃ kim api na eva syāt iti saṃcintya tattvataḥ. Having truly considered, in light of the truth, that nothing whatsoever is actually being done. Yadā yat kartum āyāti tat kṛtvā āse yathāsukham. When whatever needs doing comes up, I do it and rest as ease arises. Read this carefully. Janaka has not become passive. He has not stopped acting. The actions still occur. But the entire structure of doership, the inner claim I am doing this, has fallen away because, tattvataḥ, in truth, nothing is being done by a separate doer. So the action arises, the action is performed, and there is rest. Action without the actor's signature.
Verse 13.4 describes the difference between Janaka and the yogis still in pursuit. Karma-naiṣkarmya-nirbandha-bhāvāḥ deha-stha-yoginaḥ. Yogis still situated in the body have constructed identities tied to action and non-action. They are tightly bound to karma, to performing, or to naiṣkarmya, to deliberately not performing. Saṃyoga-ayoga-virahāt. From the absence of both contact and non-contact, that is, having transcended both the seeking of contact with experiences and the deliberate avoidance of them. Aham āse yathāsukham. Janaka neither chases experience nor flees it. The whole logic of yogic engineering, build this state, dismantle that state, has dissolved in him.
Verse 13.5 widens the field. Artha-anarthau na me sthityā gatyā na śayanena vā. Gain and loss are not mine by standing, by going, or by lying down. Tiṣṭhan gacchan svapan tasmāt aham āse yathāsukham. Standing, going, sleeping, I rest as ease arises. This is the verse for the worry that wakes you at three in the morning. The fear that some movement, some choice, some posture of your life, will determine your fate. Janaka cuts under it. The standing does not bring gain; the lying does not bring loss; the going does not bring anything that is not already simply happening. The whole anxious calculation of what should I do falls away.
Verse 13.6 speaks to the heart of striving. Svapato na asti me hāniḥ, siddhiḥ yatnavataḥ na vā. Sleeping, I have no loss; striving, I have no gain either. Nāśa-ullāsau vihāya asmāt. Having abandoned the rise and fall of expectation. Aham āse yathāsukham. The conviction underneath nearly all human anxiety is: if I try hard enough, I will get what I want; if I let go, I will lose it. Janaka stands free of both halves of the conviction. The compound nāśa-ullāsau is well-chosen: nāśa is destruction, decay; ullāsa is the flush of triumph, of rising. The oscillation between these two states, that emotional weather, is what he has set aside.
Verse 13.7 closes the chapter with a reflection on the moral pairs. Sukha-ādi-rūpā niyamaṃ bhāveṣu ālokya bhūriśaḥ. Having repeatedly observed, in many things, the law that pleasure and the rest follow their own course. Śubha-aśubhe vihāya asmāt. Having abandoned the auspicious and the inauspicious. Aham āse yathāsukham. The last great pair, śubha and aśubha, good and bad omens, holy and unholy circumstance, the categories under which religious life often labors. Janaka has watched these arise and pass enough times to see that they too follow their own rhythm. He has stopped subscribing to the inner ledger.
Seven verses. One refrain. The same easy posture rendered seven different ways.
There is a kind of happiness most people are trying to manufacture. It works like this: if I have enough, do enough, achieve enough, become enough, then happiness will follow. The arithmetic feels solid, but it never quite produces the result. Even when the conditions are met, the happiness either does not arrive or arrives briefly and slips away.
Janaka in this chapter is testifying to a different kind of happiness. He calls it yathāsukham, in the manner of ease, as comfort arises. The Sanskrit is not a noun. It is an adverb. Happiness is not a thing you obtain. It is a manner of being available, a way the day comes through you when you stop trying to control which version of the day arrives.
The whole chapter is built on this small grammatical move. Janaka does not say I am happy. He says I rest as ease arises. He has stopped attaching his happiness to outcomes. So when an outcome arrives that the world would call good, he rests; and when an outcome arrives that the world would call bad, he rests. The resting is the same. The resting was never about the outcome.
Look at verse 13.5 again. Artha-anarthau na me sthityā gatyā na śayanena vā. Gain and loss are not mine by standing, by going, or by lying down. Standing, going, sleeping, I rest as ease arises. This is one of the most quietly radical statements in the entire Gītā. Janaka is saying: my fate is not determined by the postures of my life. I am not going to gain what I have not already been given by adjusting my behavior, my schedule, my decisions. I am not going to lose what is naturally mine by relaxing my grip. The whole anxious calculation of what should I do falls away.
Most spiritual seekers will object to this. Surely some actions are wiser than others. Surely effort matters. Janaka does not say effort does not matter at all. He says, in 13.3, that when something needs doing, he does it. The actions still occur. What has fallen away is the inner conviction that the actions are the cause of his peace. The peace was never caused by the actions. The peace is what is left when the inner manager who insists on causing his own peace finally stands down.
This is the chapter for the exhausted reader. The person who has been trying for years to get happy. The person who has done the practices, kept the disciplines, met the milestones, and still feels somehow short of the destination. Janaka, with great kindness, is saying: the destination is not at the end of the road. It is the rest you take when you notice the road was never going to deliver you. The rest is yathāsukham. As ease arises. Not because you have engineered it, but because you have stopped engineering against it.
Notice the verse about the renouncer in 13.1. Janaka could have made this chapter into a praise of his royal life: see, even as king, I am free. Instead, he turns to the renouncer and says: even in the loincloth, svāsthya is rare. Svāsthya is from sva-stha, abiding in oneself, the same root as svasthendriyaḥ in chapter eleven. It is the standing in one's own ground. The renouncer who has given up everything but still grips his renunciation has not found it. The householder who has refused nothing but still grips his belongings has not found it either. Svāsthya is not about what you have. It is about whether the having or not-having still pulls you. Janaka has stopped being pulled by either side.
Verse 13.2 is the most precise diagnostic in the chapter. Kutrāpi khedaḥ kāyasya, somewhere the body has its distress. Jihvā kutrāpi khedyate, somewhere the tongue is troubled. Manaḥ kutrāpi, the mind too, has its trouble somewhere. Most of us collapse all three into one inner statement: I am suffering. But the body's discomfort is not the same as the tongue's difficulty, which is not the same as the mind's heaviness. When Janaka locates each in its own field, the unified I am suffering dissolves into several smaller, more local truths: a body that aches, a tongue that finds it hard to speak, a mind with its own weight. Each truth is real. None of them collapses into a story about the I. Located properly, the disturbances do not disturb the puruṣa underneath.
This is a quietly liberating practice. The next time you find yourself saying I am unhappy, you might check: where, exactly, is the unhappiness? In the body? In the throat? In the chest? In the mind's commentary? Almost always, the unhappiness is local. The I am unhappy is a generalization that gathers up several smaller experiences and gives them a single name. Janaka has un-gathered them. The body knows what it knows; the tongue knows what it knows; the mind knows what it knows; and the puruṣa, the one in whom all of this is happening, is at rest.
The chapter does something else that is rare in spiritual literature. It does not ask you to be especially good. The closing verse, 13.7, sets aside śubha-aśubha, the auspicious and the inauspicious, the religiously favorable and the religiously unfavorable. Janaka has watched these too many times to be subject to them. Some days bring good omens; some days bring bad. The chapter says: do not arrange your inner peace around the omens. The omens come and go. The peace is in not subscribing.
This is what makes Yathāsukham one of the most accessible chapters in the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā. It does not require you to be a renouncer. It does not require you to be a meditator. It does not require you to control your circumstances. It asks one thing: stop tying your inner state to the outer event. Let the outer event arrive, let it pass, let the next one arrive. And in the middle of the arriving and passing, aham āse yathāsukham. I rest as ease arises.
Yathāsukham has its own family of teachers, men and women who lived without engineering their happiness.
Dakshinamurti, the silent teacher of Śankara's hymn, sits beneath the banyan tree teaching by stillness alone. His four disciples, all older than him, sit and understand. There is no doctrine being transmitted, no method being taught. Just sitting and just understanding. Dakshinamurti is the iconic image of aham āse yathāsukham: ease arising and being met by ease, without the labor of words. Shankara wrote his hymn to Dakshinamurti precisely because the silent teacher demonstrates what no spoken teaching can quite reach: the natural happiness that does not need a cause. The Dakshinamurti hymn opens with the recognition that the world appears within the teacher like a city seen in a mirror: present, but not weighing on him. That is the geometry of Janaka's seven verses.
Sadasiva Brahmendra, the seventeenth-century saint of Nerur, walked through the Tanjore region as an avadhūta, often naked, often silent for months on end. There is a story that a king's elephants accidentally trampled him; when his disciples came in distress, they found him intact, smiling, having shifted to the other side of the field without seeming to have moved. The hagiography is not the point. The point is the quality of his being. Sadasiva composed Sanskrit songs of great beauty, including the Manasa Sancara Re, in which he tells the mind to wander not toward the trivialities of the world but toward the Self that needs no destination. Yathāsukham is the natural climate of his life. He did not have to manage his happiness because he had stopped having a stake in any particular outcome. The story of the trampling, whether literal or symbolic, captures the truth: nothing reached him because nothing was contested in him.
Bhagavān Ramana, again, holds this chapter naturally. His daily life in Tiruvannamalai was almost defiantly ordinary in its yathāsukham quality. He ate what was given. He slept on the same couch for fifty years. He sat with whoever came. When grief came to the ashram, he sat with it. When joy came, he sat with that. There is a famous story of a monkey troop coming through and disrupting the kitchen; Ramana laughed and let them. There is another story of his mother dying in his arms; he sat with that too, hand on her chest, until the last breath. The two events received the same quality of attention because Ramana was not preferring one event over the other. Aham āse yathāsukham is the inner climate from which both responses flowed.
One cross-tradition figure meets this chapter without distortion. Rumi, in the Mathnawi and in the Diwan, sang again and again about a happiness that does not depend on conditions. His famous instruction was bemurd, die before you die. Die to the project of arranging your life into satisfaction. Fanā, the annihilation of the self that demands certain outcomes, is the necessary doorway. What lies on the other side, in Rumi's vocabulary, is baqā, the abiding that does not strive. Baqā sits in the same neighborhood as yathāsukham, though the two speak from different theological grammars. The lover who has died to his own demands rests in whatever comes from the Beloved. Bitter or sweet, near or far, gain or loss, all of these are received with the same quality. Janaka would recognize Rumi's mood, even across the centuries and the difference of tradition. The fanā that ends in baqā and the tyāga-ādāne vihāya that ends in aham āse yathāsukham describe a similar standing.
Standing, going, sleeping. Gain and loss are not mine by any of these. So I rest as ease arises.
Scriptural References
Content with what comes of its own, beyond the pairs of opposites, free of envy, even-minded in success and failure, one is not bound even while acting.
यदृच्छालाभसन्तुष्टो द्वन्द्वातीतो विमत्सरः । समः सिद्धावसिद्धौ च कृत्वापि न निबध्यते ॥
yadṛcchā-lābha-santuṣṭo dvandvātīto vimatsaraḥ | samaḥ siddhāv asiddhau ca kṛtvāpi na nibadhyate ||
Content with what arrives of its own accord, gone past the pairs, free of envy, even in success and failure, one is not bound even after acting.
The Gītā's clearest articulation of the inner climate of *yathāsukham*. *Yadṛcchā-lābha*, gain that arrives of its own accord, is exactly what Janaka rests with in 13.3 and 13.5.
When one gives up all desires that arise in the mind and is satisfied in the Self by the Self, one is called firmly established in wisdom.
विहाय कामान्यः सर्वान्पुमांश्चरति निःस्पृहः । निर्ममो निरहङ्कारः स शान्तिमधिगच्छति ॥
vihāya kāmān yaḥ sarvān pumāṃś carati niḥspṛhaḥ | nirmamo nirahaṅkāraḥ sa śāntim adhigacchati ||
The one who walks free of all desires, without longing, without mine-ness, without ego, reaches peace.
Krishna's prescription for *śānti* is also Janaka's description of his own life. *Niḥspṛha*, without longing, is the inner texture of *yathāsukham*. The peace is not something added; it is what remains when grasping and ego are released.
Equipoised in honor and dishonor, heat and cold, joy and sorrow, free of all unfavorable association.
समः शत्रौ च मित्रे च तथा मानापमानयोः । शीतोष्णसुखदुःखेषु समः सङ्गविवर्जितः ॥
samaḥ śatrau ca mitre ca tathā mānāpamānayoḥ | śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkheṣu samaḥ saṅga-vivarjitaḥ ||
Equal toward enemy and friend, toward honor and dishonor, equal in cold and heat, in pleasure and pain, free of attachment.
Part of Krishna's portrait of the *bhakta* he loves. The list of pairs maps almost verse for verse onto Janaka's *aham āse yathāsukham*: each pair is set down, and what remains is sameness.
Performing one's duty without attachment, one attains the supreme.
तस्मादसक्तः सततं कार्यं कर्म समाचर । असक्तो ह्याचरन्कर्म परमाप्नोति पूरुषः ॥
tasmād asaktaḥ satataṃ kāryaṃ karma samācara | asakto hy ācaran karma param āpnoti pūruṣaḥ ||
Therefore, without attachment, always perform the action that is to be done. By acting without attachment, one reaches the supreme.
Aṣṭāvakra 13.3 says: when something needs doing, I do it and rest. This is the experiential side of Krishna's command. The doing happens; the doer does not return to claim the doing.
The wise person who is the same toward a clod, stone, and gold, established in the Self, is beyond the three guṇas.
समदुःखसुखः स्वस्थः समलोष्टाश्मकाञ्चनः । तुल्यप्रियाप्रियो धीरस्तुल्यनिन्दात्मसंस्तुतिः ॥
sama-duḥkha-sukhaḥ svasthaḥ sama-loṣṭāśma-kāñcanaḥ | tulya-priyāpriyo dhīras tulya-nindātma-saṃstutiḥ ||
Equal in pleasure and pain, resting in the Self, regarding clod, stone, and gold alike, steady amid the dear and unpleasant, steady amid blame and praise.
*Svastha*, resting in the Self, is the same word Janaka uses in 13.1, where he calls it *svāsthya*. Krishna's portrait of the *guṇātīta* and Janaka's portrait of his own ease are the same portrait rendered twice.