Ashtavakra Gita 1.6
Ashtavakra Gita 1.6 is a verse from chapter 1 (The witness). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "Right and wrong, pleasure and pain belong to the mind. They are not yours, all-pervading one. You are not the doer and not the one who enjoys. You are free, always."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
धर्माधर्मौ सुखं दुःखं मानसानि न ते विभो ।न कर्तासि न भोक्तासि मुक्त एवासि सर्वदा ॥
dharmādharmau sukhaṃ duḥkhaṃ mānasāni na te vibho |na kartāsi na bhoktāsi mukta evāsi sarvadā ||
Right and wrong, pleasure and pain belong to the mind. They are not yours, all-pervading one. You are not the doer and not the one who enjoys. You are free, always.
What to notice
Right and wrong are moved into the mind, along with pleasure and pain.
Word by word
- dharma-adharmau
- right and wrong, merit and demerit
- sukham
- pleasure
- duḥkham
- pain
- mānasāni
- belonging to the mind
- te
- yours
- vibho
- O all-pervading one
- kartā
- doer
- bhoktā
- enjoyer, the one who experiences results
- muktaḥ
- free
- eva
- indeed
- sarvadā
- always
Reading the verse
This verse sounds dangerous until you read it with the tradition. Dharma and adharma here mean merit and demerit, the moral weight that actions leave behind. Ashtavakra places them in the mind along with pleasure and pain. He calls Janaka vibhu, all-pervading, and says the Self is neither the doer of actions nor the one who reaps their results. Advaita teachers are careful with this. The body and mind still act, and they still answer for what they do. Ethics stays in force at the level where action happens. What changes is the sense of who is acting. The Self is compared to light in a room: everything in the room is seen by it, and none of it belongs to it. The phrase mukta eva asi sarvadā, you are always free, is the heart of the verse. Freedom is described as a fact about you, present before any effort, which is why the next verses can say that the only bondage is a mistake about who you are.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 13.32Krishna says the Self, though dwelling in the body, does not act and is not stained.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.