Ashtavakra Gita 1.3
Ashtavakra Gita 1.3 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "You are not earth, water, fire, air or space. To be free, know yourself as the witness of all these, made of awareness."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
न पृथ्वी न जलं नाग्निर्न वायुर्द्यौर्न वा भवान् ।एषां साक्षिणमात्मानं चिद्रूपं विद्धि मुक्तये ॥
na pṛthvī na jalaṃ nāgnirna vāyurdyaurna vā bhavān |eṣāṃ sākṣiṇamātmānaṃ cidrūpaṃ viddhi muktaye ||
You are not earth, water, fire, air or space. To be free, know yourself as the witness of all these, made of awareness.
What to notice
Every element is named and set aside, and what remains is the one who sees them.
Word by word
- na
- not
- pṛthvī
- earth
- jalam
- water
- agniḥ
- fire
- vāyuḥ
- air
- dyauḥ
- sky, space
- bhavān
- you
- eṣām
- of these
- sākṣiṇam
- the witness
- ātmānam
- the Self
- cidrūpam
- whose form is awareness
- viddhi
- know
- muktaye
- for freedom
Reading the verse
Indian philosophy describes the body and the physical world as built from five elements: earth, water, fire, air and space. Ashtavakra lists all five and says you are none of them. This is the method the Upanishads call neti neti, not this, not this. You remove what can be seen until only the seer is left. The key word is sākṣin, the witness. A witness in a court watches events without taking part in them, and that is the sense here. The Advaita teachers point out that whatever you can observe, including your body, your moods and your thoughts, stands in front of you as an object. The one observing cannot be one of those objects. The verse then adds cidrūpa, whose form is awareness, so the witness has content of its own: the plain fact of being aware. Ashtavakra presents this as the means to freedom, muktaye. He asks Janaka to notice what was always the case, with nothing new to believe.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 13.2Krishna calls the body the field and the one who knows it the knower of the field.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.