Ananta Introduces Readings from the Ashtavakra Gita (Day 1) - 27th September 2016

What I was feeling to do today actually is to... I came across this very nice translation of the Ashtavakra Gita by Bart Marshall. It's very beautiful. I just was coming through it yesterday, so I felt I could read a little bit from this. You like? Yeah? Came closer today. I'm actually going to listen. Okay, so this is the translator's introduction. I felt, I feel to read the intro.

That it is an ancient spiritual document of great purity and power. Pure because it is relentlessly one-pointed; every word is aimed at triggering self-realization. No suggestions for self-improvement, no rules for moral behavior, no practical wisdom for daily life. Powerful because the mere reading or repeated reading of it can be enough to send a right mind reeling into truths. Little is known about the Ashtavakra Gita. Ashtavakra is a name that appears in Indian lore, but almost certainly he did not write it. These are not my words, I'm just reading what the introduction... the author, likely an anonymous sage, merely uses the characters of Ashtavakra and King Janaka to set up a classic dialogue between Guru and disciple. It quickly becomes a Guru-Guru dialogue, however, because after the first salvo of wisdom from Ashtavakra, Janaka realizes, realizes his true self, and from then on they get into an Advaitic jam session of the highest sort.

Just a couple of things coming up to say about this. One is that, uh, this is the first time actually I'm reading something like saying that it is not actually Ashtavakra and Janaka in the dialogue. I heard this many times about the Bhagavad Gita because everyone said at least it cannot be on the battlefield that the war was about to start and then these two took like a good amount of time. 'Give us, give us a few minutes, we're sorting something out.' So, Ashtavakra actually, whatever little I know about him, is famous also in Indian, in India, because Ashtavakra means the eight contractions. So the eight... what is the right word? Triple eight place... bent in places. So eight places he was bent, see? And he's known as that sage who was bent, who had his body was completely convoluted because it was bent at eight places.

And Janaka also we speak about in Satsang sometimes because Guruji has this example of telling everyone that everyone wants the Janaka style enlightenment. What does it mean? So Janaka was a king. He was a king and he was an enlightened sage. So somewhere Guruji also speaks that one of the fear that came for him that he's going to be a hunchback beggar on the streets of Brixton after he becomes free or something like this. He's going to be like causing Mooji... he says sometimes that he's begging on the street. So this fear can come, and because this fear can come, we can have this idea that 'I want that the Janaka had. I want to be the king of my kingdom. I want to have my attachments and also be free.' So in this we'll discover what Janaka's true attitude was, whether there was any attachment to the kingdom also. We'll find out. Actually, I, I read the Ashtavakra Gita many, many years ago. Many years ago. Just... and otherwise it's just been few bits here and there. So let's see. Let's see what it... then he says.

Because of, because of this, some translators have done away with the dialogue format and attributed everything to Ashtavakra. Indeed, since all the verses of the Ashtavakra exist at the highest possible level of spoken wisdom, it would appear meaningless to attribute some to the teacher and some to the newly enlightened disciple. There is nevertheless a storyline set up in the Ashtavakra Gita and for me it goes somewhere something like this: