The Pure Self

Kaivalya is not loneliness. Kevala means alone, singular, unmixed. Kaivalya is the state of the Self standing in its own purity, with no admixture of other. Aṣṭāvakra is naming the state and then walking through twenty of its visible signs.

Verse 17.1 sets the frame. Tena jñāna-phalaṃ prāptaṃ yogābhyāsa-phalaṃ tathā. By him the fruit of knowledge has been attained, and also the fruit of yoga-practice. Tṛptaḥ svacchendriyo nityaṃ ekākī ramate tu yaḥ. He who, satisfied, his senses clear, always alone, takes delight. Tṛpta, satisfied. Svacchendriya, with senses unclouded. Ekākī, solitary, but not isolated: the solitude is the inner aloneness of kaivalya, the awareness no longer mixed with other. Ramate, takes delight. The first verse already breaks any image of the liberated one as joyless. They are delighted, they are alone in the most precise sense.

Verse 17.2 explains why. Na kadācij jagaty asmin tattvajñā hanta khidyati. In this world the knower of truth, alas, is never distressed. Yata ekena tena idaṃ pūrṇaṃ brahmāṇḍa-maṇḍalam. Because by that one, the whole sphere of the cosmos is filled. Hanta, alas, is the soft exclamation the seer adds, almost gentle, almost sorrowful that others do not see. The whole brahmāṇḍa is filled by the one. There is no other place from which distress could come.

Verse 17.3 gives the famous image. Na jātu viṣayāḥ ke'pi svārāmaṃ harṣayanty amī. Sense-objects never gladden the one who delights in himself. Sallakī-pallava-prītam ivebhaṃ nimba-pallavāḥ. As the leaves of the nimba do not please the elephant who loves the leaves of the sallakī. The image is exact. The elephant has tasted sallakī, sweet. The bitter neem leaves cannot tempt him. The one who has tasted the Self has tasted sallakī. The sense-world is nimba, and it has no pull.

Verse 17.4 ratchets it tighter. Yas tu bhogeṣu bhukteṣu na bhavaty adhivāsitā. The one who, in pleasures already enjoyed, is not impregnated. Abhukteṣu nirākāṅkṣī tad-dṛśo bhava-durlabhaḥ. And in unenjoyed ones, without longing: such a one is hard to find in the world. Adhivāsita is the word that does the work, the perfume soaked into cloth. Sense-experience does not soak into the jñānī. It passes through and leaves no scent.

Verse 17.5 names the rare type. Bubhukṣur iha saṃsāre mumukṣur api dṛśyate. The one who wants enjoyment, and the one who wants liberation, are both visible in this world. Bhoga-mokṣa-nirākāṅkṣī viralo hi mahāśayaḥ. The great-hearted one who longs neither for enjoyment nor for liberation is rare. Mahāśaya, great-vessel, the one in whom the longing has fallen away entirely. The chapter quietly assumes that this is the goal, and that it is not the same as either the worldly or the renunciate.

Verse 17.6 closes the door on the framework of the four ends of human life. Dharma-artha-kāma-mokṣeṣu jīvite maraṇe tathā. In duty, wealth, pleasure, liberation, and equally in living and dying. Kasyāpy udāra-cittasya heyopādeyatā na hi. For some noble-hearted one, there is no accepting and rejecting. The same indifference covers the four classical aims and the binary of life and death. The udāra-citta is past all of them.

Verses 17.7 and 17.8 describe the equanimity at the level of cosmic dissolution. Vāṅchā na viśva-vilaye na dveṣas tasya ca sthitau. No wish for the world to be dissolved, no aversion to its standing. Yathā jīvikayā tasmād dhanya āste yathā sukham. By the livelihood that comes, that fortunate one sits as happily as can be. The chapter is doing something subtle. The truly liberated person does not even prefer mokṣa to saṃsāra. The cosmic show may end or continue. They have no investment in either outcome. Kṛtārtho'nena jñānena ity evaṃ galita-dhīḥ kṛtī. Fulfilled by this knowledge, his intellect having dissolved, the accomplished one. Paśyan śṛṇvan spṛśan jighrann aśnann āste yathā sukham. Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, he sits as happily as can be.

Galita-dhī: intellect dissolved. The instrument that once strove to know has melted into the knowing. The ordinary acts of sensing remain. The strain has gone.

Verse 17.9 names a strange visible quality. Śūnyā dṛṣṭir vṛthā ceṣṭā vikalānīndriyāṇi ca. The gaze is empty, the movement seems aimless, the senses are unmoored. Na spṛhā na viraktir vā kṣīṇa-saṃsāra-sāgare. In the one whose ocean of saṃsāra has gone dry, there is no longing and no renunciation. There is no longer a personality propelling the senses or projecting a story. The look in the eyes is śūnya, empty in the sense of not full of self-reference. The actions look vṛthā, in vain, because they are not aimed at anything separate.

Verse 17.10 sketches the in-between state. Na jāgarti na nidrāti. He does not wake, does not sleep. Na unmīlati na mīlati. The eyes do not open, do not close. Aho para-daśā kvāpi vartate mukta-cetasaḥ. What a strange other-state, somewhere, the one of the freed mind dwells in. Aho, what wonder. Aṣṭāvakra himself is moved.

Verse 17.11 closes the description with an inclusion. Sarvatra dṛśyate svasthaḥ sarvatra vimalāśayaḥ. Everywhere he appears standing in himself, everywhere of pure intent. Samasta-vāsanā-mukto muktaḥ sarvatra rājate. Free from all latent tendencies, the liberated one reigns everywhere. Rājate, shines, reigns, holds the place. The vāsanās, the latent patterns that propel ordinary life, are entirely undone.

Verses 17.12 to 17.17 form the great list of negations. He sees, hears, touches, smells, eats, receives, speaks, walks. He is free of the wanted and the unwanted. Īhita-anīhita. He neither blames nor praises, neither rejoices nor rages, neither gives nor takes. He sees a woman in love, or death itself approaching, and remains unshaken, avihvala. He is neither violent nor compassionate in the usual sense, neither arrogant nor abject, neither astonished nor agitated. The list is precise. The liberated one is not a moral exemplar in the conventional sense. The conventional categories simply do not stick.

Verse 17.18 names the state by name. Samādhāna-asamādhāna-hita-ahita-vikalpanāḥ. The mental constructs of focused and unfocused, helpful and unhelpful. Śūnya-citto na jānāti kaivalyam iva saṃsthitaḥ. The one of empty mind does not know them, standing as if in kaivalya. Iva, as if: not because it is somewhat, but because kaivalya is not a state achieved but the natural condition once the constructs go silent.

Verse 17.19 brings the central paradox of the jīvanmukta. Nirmamo nirahaṅkāro na kiṃcid iti niścitaḥ. Without mine-maker, without I-maker, settled in the certainty that nothing is. Antar-galita-sarva-āśaḥ kurvann api karoti na. All desire inwardly dissolved, even while acting he does not act. This is the bedrock teaching: kurvann api karoti na. Even while acting, he does not act. Doing continues. The doer has gone.

The chapter closes at verse 17.20. Manaḥ-prakāśa-sammoha-svapna-jāḍya-vivarjitaḥ. Free from the mind's display, from delusion, from dream, from dullness. Daśāṃ kām api saṃprāpto bhaved galita-mānasaḥ. The one whose mind has dissolved has arrived at some indefinable state. Galita-mānasa: mind dissolved. Kām api, some unnameable one. Even Aṣṭāvakra refuses to name it. The chapter ends in a kind of reverent inarticulacy. The state cannot be described from outside it.

Ramana Maharshi is the standing illustration of chapter 17. Devotees who knew him for decades wrote, with care, that they could not name a single moment when his composure had wavered. A scorpion crawled across his bare leg during a talk; he continued speaking. His mother died beside him; he sat with her body and chanted softly, neither performing grief nor refusing it. A cow that he had cared for as a calf died, and he sat by its grave. He laughed easily, ate what was placed before him, walked the hill of Arunachala in the evenings. The body went on. The doer was nowhere in evidence. Devotees would describe what Aṣṭāvakra calls galita-dhī: an intelligence that responded perfectly without ever clutching at being right. Ramana is the textbook example of kurvann api karoti na. He acted. He did not act.

Avadhūta Dattātreya, in tradition, is the paradigmatic kaivalya figure. The Bhāgavata records his account of the twenty-four gurus he learned from: a python, a fish, a moth, a bee, a courtesan, an arrow-maker, a young girl with bangles. Every one of them taught him a piece of jñāna-mukta-lakṣaṇa. The python lies still, eating only what comes to it: yathā jīvikayā tasmād dhanya āste yathā sukham. The bee gathers pollen from many flowers and takes nothing for itself: the jñānī engages without accumulation. The girl with the bangles slips them off one by one until only one remains, because one bangle alone does not clatter: the jñānī who has gone quiet is the one bangle. Aṣṭāvakra's verse 17.20, the unnameable state, is the state Datta sings from in the Avadhūta Gītā. He is the chapter walking.

Lalleshwari of Kashmir, the fourteenth-century yoginī known as Lal Ded, walked through the streets of Pampore singing her vākhs. Tradition records that she abandoned the orthodoxies of her time, walking past every social and religious convention. She is reported to have sometimes walked without clothing, and the songs ascribed to her say things that read like commentary on Aṣṭāvakra 17. I, Lalla, set out hoping to find Hari like a flower in a field. After all the searching, I found Him within. He had been there all along, with me, by me. Her vākhs describe a mind that has kṣīṇa-saṃsaraṇa, transmigration exhausted. She walked through her village as if she had walked through a dream and was now awake inside it. She is one of the clearest medieval expressions of the chapter.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, in his last years, often refused to comment on questions about how a liberated person should behave. He would say: there is no should. The behavior comes from where it comes. He himself ran his bidi shop until late in his teaching life. He smoked. He coughed. He grew impatient with seekers who would not listen. He grew tender with those who did. None of it was performed. Devotees noted that he could be sharp one moment and laughing the next, and that no residue carried from one to the other. Adhivāsita had stopped. The perfume of pleasure and pain no longer soaked into the cloth. He was demonstrating verse 17.4.

From the wider nondual span, Meister Eckhart in his German sermons described what he called the adel, the noble man, who has nothing of his own and acts from the ground that is one with God's ground. The acts continue. The owner of the acts has gone. Eckhart wrote, in one famous sermon, that the just man neither rejoices nor grieves at God's will, because his own will is gone. This is not identical to Aṣṭāvakra's kaivalya; the theological grammars differ. But the description of the acting that does not belong to anyone is close enough that it bears noticing. Eckhart was condemned for sentences like this. Aṣṭāvakra wrote them down without controversy and the tradition kept them.