Ashtavakra Gita 1.19
Ashtavakra Gita 1.19 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "As a mirror is present inside the image it holds and all around it, so the Supreme Lord is present inside this body and all around it."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
यथैवादर्शमध्यस्थे रूपेऽन्तः परितस्तु सः ।तथैवाऽस्मिन् शरीरेऽन्तः परितः परमेश्वरः ॥
yathaivādarśamadhyasthe rūpe'ntaḥ paritastu saḥ |tathaivā'smin śarīre'ntaḥ paritaḥ parameśvaraḥ ||
As a mirror is present inside the image it holds and all around it, so the Supreme Lord is present inside this body and all around it.
What to notice
The mirror is both inside the reflection and around it, and so is the Lord with the body.
Word by word
- yathā eva
- just as
- ādarśa
- mirror
- madhya-sthe
- standing within
- rūpe
- in the image, the form
- antaḥ
- inside
- paritaḥ
- all around
- tu
- and
- saḥ
- it
- tathā eva
- in the same way
- asmin śarīre
- in this body
- parameśvaraḥ
- the Supreme Lord
Reading the verse
Look at a face in a mirror. Where is the mirror? It is behind every point of the image, and it extends past the edges of the image too. The face seems to have depth and to be somewhere, but every part of it is mirror. Ashtavakra says the Supreme Lord is in this body the same way, inside it and all around it. The word chosen is parameśvara, the Supreme Lord, which shows that the Ashtavakra Gita, for all its austerity, does not avoid the language of devotion. The Advaita teachers read the mirror as awareness and the face as the body. The body seems solid and separate, but there is no point in it where awareness is absent, and awareness does not stop at the skin. A practical way to use this verse is to feel the body from inside for a moment, the breath and the weight, and then notice that the knowing of these sensations has no edge. The image is inside the mirror. The mirror is not inside the image.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 9.4Krishna says all this is pervaded by him in his unmanifest form, and all beings rest in him.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.