Ashtavakra Gita 1.11
Ashtavakra Gita 1.11 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "One who thinks 'I am free' is free. One who thinks 'I am bound' stays bound. The old saying is true: as you hold yourself, so you become."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
मुक्ताभिमानी मुक्तो हि बद्धो बद्धाभिमान्यपि ।किंवदन्तीह सत्येयं या मतिः सा गतिर्भवेत् ॥
muktābhimānī mukto hi baddho baddhābhimānyapi |kiṃvadantīha satyeyaṃ yā matiḥ sā gatirbhavet ||
One who thinks 'I am free' is free. One who thinks 'I am bound' stays bound. The old saying is true: as you hold yourself, so you become.
What to notice
The famous line yā matiḥ sā gatiḥ is quoted as a saying the listener already knows.
Word by word
- mukta-abhimānī
- one who holds himself to be free
- muktaḥ
- free
- hi
- indeed
- baddhaḥ
- bound
- baddha-abhimānī
- one who holds himself to be bound
- api
- too
- kiṃvadantī
- a saying, a popular proverb
- iha
- here, in this world
- satyā
- true
- iyam
- this
- yā matiḥ
- whatever the conviction
- sā gatiḥ
- that is the outcome, the destination
- bhavet
- becomes
Reading the verse
This is the line most people quote from the Ashtavakra Gita, often without knowing its source. Ashtavakra presents the final phrase as a kiṃvadantī, a common saying, and says that here it holds true: yā matiḥ sā gatir bhavet, as your conviction, so your end. The first half applies it. One who takes himself to be free is free, and one who takes himself to be bound stays bound. Read quickly, this sounds like positive thinking. The tradition reads it more carefully. Mati here means the settled view of what you are, something deeper than a mood or an affirmation. Since the Self is already free, according to the previous verses, the only thing keeping a person bound is the view that he is bound. Change the view at its root and nothing else needs to change. Advaita teachers also use the verse as a warning. A person who keeps rehearsing his limitations, his failures and his bad luck builds a gati out of that mati. Where you settle your mind is where you end up living.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 17.3Krishna says a person is made of his faith: as one's faith is, so one is.Chapter 1, The witness: Janaka asks how to know, how to be free and how to let go, and Ashtavakra answers that he is already the free witness of everything.
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Sources and method
Sanskrit from the common text of the Ashtavakra Gita, also called the Ashtavakra Samhita. Where our source had obvious typing errors we restored the standard reading and listed each change in our review notes. IAST is generated from the Devanagari. The English, the word meanings and the notes are Wisdom's own, written in the Advaita tradition of Shankara's school, the line followed by commentators such as Swami Nityaswarupananda and Swami Chinmayananda, with Lala Baij Nath's public-domain translation of 1907 as a reference.
Wisdom translation, edited by Ankur Shukla. Commentary AI-drafted, human review pending.