Ashtavakra Gita 1.17
Ashtavakra Gita 1.17 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "Need nothing, change not, be full and cool at heart, deep in understanding and unshaken. Let your one leaning be toward awareness alone."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
निरपेक्षो निर्विकारो निर्भरः शीतलाशयः ।अगाधबुद्धिरक्षुब्धो भव चिन्मात्रवासनः ॥
nirapekṣo nirvikāro nirbharaḥ śītalāśayaḥ |agādhabuddhirakṣubdho bhava cinmātravāsanaḥ ||
Need nothing, change not, be full and cool at heart, deep in understanding and unshaken. Let your one leaning be toward awareness alone.
What to notice
The verse describes a person you could meet: cool, deep, unshaken.
Word by word
- nirapekṣaḥ
- needing nothing
- nirvikāraḥ
- unchanging
- nirbharaḥ
- full, solid
- śītala-āśayaḥ
- cool at heart
- agādha-buddhiḥ
- of fathomless understanding
- akṣubdhaḥ
- unshaken
- bhava
- be
- cinmātra-vāsanaḥ
- with your one leaning toward awareness alone
Reading the verse
Most of chapter 1 describes the Self. This verse describes how a person who knows it carries himself. Nirapekṣa means not depending on anything. Nirbhara means full, without hollow places that need filling. Śītalāśaya, cool at heart, is a lovely phrase in a hot country. It means the inner temperature stays even when things heat up. Agādha-buddhi, fathomless understanding, suggests deep water: you cannot touch the bottom with a stick. Akṣubdha, unshaken, is the word for a calm sea. The last phrase is the key to the others. Vāsanā usually means the habit-tendencies that pull the mind back to the same desires. Here Ashtavakra uses it in a good sense: let your one habit be awareness alone. The commentators read this as a concession to how minds work. Minds will lean somewhere, so let them lean toward their source. The portrait resembles the steady-minded person of the Bhagavad Gita's second chapter, who is neither shaken by sorrow nor hungry for pleasure.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 2.56Krishna describes the one of steady wisdom, unshaken in sorrow and free of craving in pleasure.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.
New to this text? Seven mornings with the Ashtavakra Gita gives you one verse a day for a week.
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.