Ashtavakra Gita 1.5
Ashtavakra Gita 1.5 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "You are not a Brahmin or of any other varna, you belong to no stage of life, and you are nothing the eyes can see. Unattached and formless, you are the witness of everything. Be happy."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
न त्वं विप्रादिको वर्णो नाश्रमी नाक्षगोचरः ।असङ्गोऽसि निराकारो विश्वसाक्षी सुखी भव ॥
na tvaṃ viprādiko varṇo nāśramī nākṣagocaraḥ |asaṅgo'si nirākāro viśvasākṣī sukhī bhava ||
You are not a Brahmin or of any other varna, you belong to no stage of life, and you are nothing the eyes can see. Unattached and formless, you are the witness of everything. Be happy.
What to notice
Caste, stage of life and visible form are all named as things you are not.
Word by word
- tvam
- you
- vipra-ādikaḥ
- a Brahmin or any other
- varṇaḥ
- varna, social class
- āśramī
- one in a stage of life
- akṣa-gocaraḥ
- within reach of the eyes and senses
- asaṅgaḥ
- unattached
- asi
- you are
- nirākāraḥ
- formless
- viśva-sākṣī
- witness of everything
- sukhī bhava
- be happy
Reading the verse
The phrase vipra-ādiko varṇaḥ means a Brahmin or any of the other varnas. Ashtavakra is speaking to a Kshatriya king and tells him he is no varna at all. He adds that Janaka belongs to no āśrama, the four stages of student, householder, forest-dweller and renunciant, and that he is nothing the senses can grasp. These were the main ways a person was placed in society, and all of them belong to the body and its roles. The Advaita reading is consistent: such identities are real for social life and duty, and the Self they describe is untouched by them. The verse leaves dharma in place and says what you are underneath it. The teacher's own name sharpens the point. Ashtavakra means bent in eight places, and in the Mahabharata he is born with a body bent by his father's curse. Here that teacher tells a king that the body is not the person. The verse ends, as many do in this chapter, with a simple instruction: be happy.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 5.18Krishna says the wise see the same Self in a learned Brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog and an outcaste.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.