Ashtavakra Gita 1.20
Ashtavakra Gita 1.20 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "As one all-pervading space is inside a pot and outside it, so Brahman, eternal and unbroken, is in every being."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
एकं सर्वगतं व्योम बहिरन्तर्यथा घटे ।नित्यं निरन्तरं ब्रह्म सर्वभूतगणे तथा ॥
ekaṃ sarvagataṃ vyoma bahirantaryathā ghaṭe |nityaṃ nirantaraṃ brahma sarvabhūtagaṇe tathā ||
As one all-pervading space is inside a pot and outside it, so Brahman, eternal and unbroken, is in every being.
What to notice
Break the pot and the space inside does not go anywhere.
Word by word
- ekam
- one
- sarva-gatam
- everywhere
- vyoma
- space, sky
- bahiḥ
- outside
- antaḥ
- inside
- yathā
- just as
- ghaṭe
- in a pot
- nityam
- eternal
- nirantaram
- unbroken, without gaps
- brahma
- Brahman
- sarva-bhūta-gaṇe
- in every host of beings
- tathā
- so
Reading the verse
The pot and the space is the second classic example in Advaita, alongside the rope and the snake. A clay pot seems to enclose a little space of its own. But the space inside and outside is one space, and when the pot breaks, nothing moves. The pot-space was never a separate thing. Ashtavakra applies this to Brahman, present in every being. Each body seems to hold a private self, and Brahman is one, eternal and nirantara, without gaps, inside and outside every creature. Chapter 1 ends here, having moved from Janaka's three questions to a picture of the whole of reality. The tradition draws two lessons from the verse. The first concerns death: when the pot breaks, the space is not harmed. The second concerns other people: the space in your pot and the space in your neighbour's pot are the same space. The Bhagavad Gita uses a related image, of the wind that moves everywhere and still rests in space, to say how all beings rest in the Lord.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 9.6Krishna compares all beings resting in him to the great wind that moves everywhere and stays within space.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.