The Lord (Tranquility)

Four verses, each a small finished sentence. Janaka is no longer building an argument. He is naming what is so.

14.1 opens with a striking phrase. Prakṛtyā śūnya-citto yaḥ. The one whose mind is empty by nature. Prakṛtyā, by nature, not by effort. The mind has not been emptied through a discipline. It is simply not full. Pramādāt bhāva-bhāvanaḥ. Out of negligence, only out of inadvertence, does he occasionally have a thought about the world. The Sanskrit is delicious here: pramādāt, from a slight lapse, an absent-minded moment. The default condition is empty; thoughts arise only as small departures from that default, the way a still pond occasionally ripples. Nidrito bodhita iva. As if asleep while awake. This is the famous Vedāntic phrase: outwardly active, inwardly at rest. Kṣīṇa-saṃsmaraṇaḥ hi saḥ. In him, the work of memory has worn thin. He is not constantly rehearsing his past, not constantly rehearsing his identity. The faculty of saṃsmaraṇa, of carrying forward, has grown subtle in him.

14.2 unfolds as a small song of disappearances. Kva dhanāni kva mitrāṇi. Where are riches, where are friends? Kva me viṣaya-dasyavaḥ. Where, for me, are the thieves of sense-objects? Viṣaya-dasyavaḥ is one of the most pointed compounds in the chapter: viṣaya, the objects of the senses; dasyu, the highway robber. The senses' objects, Janaka says, were the thieves that used to steal his attention. Kva śāstraṃ kva ca vijñānam. Where are the scriptures, where is even discrimination, the technical knowledge of philosophy? Yadā me galitā spṛhā. When longing has dissolved in me. The verb galitā is the same gentle word used in chapter eleven, galita, melted, dissolved. The whole inventory of what once mattered, riches, friendships, sense-pleasures, scriptural learning, philosophical knowledge, has not been rejected. It has simply stopped showing up. Spṛhā, the slight inner pull, has melted, and the whole inventory melts with it.

14.3 answers the seeker's central anxieties. Vijñāte sākṣi-puruṣe parama-ātmani ca īśvare. When the witness-person, the supreme Self, the Lord, has been recognized. Three names for one recognition: sākṣi-puruṣa, the witness-person; parama-ātman, the supreme Self; Īśvara, the Lord. Janaka is not making a distinction between three things. He is showing how the same recognition can be named in three vocabularies, the Sāṅkhya, the Vedāntic, and the devotional. Nairāśye bandha-mokṣe ca. In hopelessness, in bondage, in liberation. Na cintā muktaye mama. There is no anxiety in me for liberation. This is a remarkable closing. The seeker's last and most subtle desire, the desire for mokṣa, has fallen away. Janaka does not say he has been liberated. He says: there is no longer any anxiety about liberation. The seeker who urgently wanted to escape bondage has discovered that the urgency itself was the last knot.

14.4 closes the chapter with a quiet observation. Antar-vikalpa-śūnyasya bahiḥ svacchanda-cāriṇaḥ. Of one whose inner space is free of vikalpa, of mind-made alternatives, and who outwardly walks at his own ease. Bhrāntasya iva daśāḥ tāḥ tāḥ. The states such a one passes through look like those of someone confused. Tādṛśāḥ eva jānate. Only those of his own kind know him. The verse is, in its way, a small joke. To the outside observer, the jīvanmukta looks like he has lost his bearings. He does what he does without reference to the usual scaffolding of vikalpa, of choosing between options, of weighing the customary considerations. He walks at his own ease. To the conventional eye, this looks like confusion. Only those who have themselves crossed over recognize what they are looking at.

Four verses. The whole chapter does not even raise its voice. It speaks like someone who knows the difference between night and day, but no longer has a preference between them.

Three figures stand out in the lineage as living portraits of this chapter.

Dattātreya, the avadhūta whose Avadhūta Gītā is, in many ways, a longer treatment of the same condition, is the iconic figure. He walks naked, without belongings, without a fixed abode, and without inner agitation. His verses speak constantly from inside the recognition Janaka names: there is no bondage to escape, no liberation to attain, no one in particular who is doing anything. Dattātreya names this directly in his first chapter, where he says repeatedly that he is the formless, all-pervasive Self. Janaka in chapter fourteen has not given up his kingdom, but in his inner life he has become a avadhūta: one in whom spṛhā has melted and vikalpa has resolved into emptiness. The outer dress differs; the inner mode is identical.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, in the last years of his life, lived this chapter without claiming to. Visitors who came to his Khetwadi room in the 1970s and 1980s found a man who was visibly impatient with anyone who came hunting for liberation. He did not refuse to teach; he refused to feed the hunger that came looking for a liberation-experience. Na cintā muktaye mama, Janaka says. There is no anxiety in me for liberation. Nisargadatta echoed the same impatience in different words: you are already that; what more do you want? His instruction was not to attain anything but to recognize what one already was. The chapter's final verse, about how the jñānī looks to the outside observer like someone confused, applies to Nisargadatta as much as to anyone. He smoked bidis, he sold them in his shop, he shouted at visitors, he laughed often, and through it all the sākṣi-puruṣa was simply unattached.

Lalla, the fourteenth-century woman saint of Kashmir, known as Lal Ded, walked the villages naked or near-naked, singing her vakhs in Kashmiri. She had left the prescribed life of a Brahmin wife and walked out into a life that to her contemporaries looked like confusion. Tādṛśāḥ eva jānate, Janaka says. Only those of his own kind know him. Lalla's villages did not always know what to make of her, and yet her verses survive seven centuries later because what she was singing was the same recognition Janaka names. Her vākhs return again and again to a divine that the searching mind looks for outside and finally meets within, a Self that needed no liberation because it had never been bound. She is one of the small handful of nondual voices in the tradition who speak from inside a woman's body and a non-monastic life, and she belongs in the family of Īśvaraḥ.

One cross-tradition voice meets this chapter without distortion. Meister Eckhart, in his sermon on poverty of spirit, says that a poor person is one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing. The structure of Janaka's chapter is uncannily close. Galitā spṛhā: wanting nothing. Kva śāstraṃ kva ca vijñānam: where are the scriptures, where is the knowledge. Kva dhanāni: where are the riches. Eckhart's three poverties and Janaka's three dissolutions describe the same emptying, in different theological vocabularies. The poor person, in Eckhart's German, is the one in whom God can be God, because nothing of the self stands in the way. Janaka, in his Sanskrit, is the one in whom Īśvara can be Īśvara, because the inner scaffolding of spṛhā has dissolved. The two traditions meet here at the same emptiness.

Aham āse yathāsukham, Janaka said in the chapter before. Na cintā muktaye mama, he says here. The two refrains are the same refrain, sung from inside the silence that follows when the song's question has been answered.