Ashtavakra Gita 11.5
Ashtavakra Gita 11.5 is a verse from chapter 11 (Eight certainties). The sage Ashtavakra speaks it to King Janaka. In plain English it says: "Sorrow is born of worry and of nothing else here. One who is sure of this is free of worry, happy, at peace, his wanting melted everywhere."
Ashtavakra, to King Janaka
चिन्तया जायते दुःखं नान्यथेहेति निश्चयी ।तया हीनः सुखी शान्तः सर्वत्र गलितस्पृहः ॥
cintayā jāyate duḥkhaṃ nānyatheheti niścayī |tayā hīnaḥ sukhī śāntaḥ sarvatra galitaspṛhaḥ ||
Sorrow is born of worry and of nothing else here. One who is sure of this is free of worry, happy, at peace, his wanting melted everywhere.
What to notice
The verse names one source of sorrow, worry, and adds 'and nothing else here'.
Word by word
- cintayā
- by worry, anxious thought
- jāyate
- is born
- duḥkham
- sorrow
- na anyathā
- not otherwise
- iha
- here
- iti
- thus
- niścayī
- one who is sure
- tayā hīnaḥ
- free of it
- sukhī
- happy
- śāntaḥ
- at peace
- sarvatra
- everywhere
- galita-spṛhaḥ
- with wanting melted away
Reading the verse
Chapter 11 has eight verses, each built around niścayī, one who is certain. This one names worry, cintā, as the source of sorrow, and says nānyatheha, not otherwise, here. The claim is strong. Events happen, losses happen, but the sorrow that lingers and spreads is made of thought turning over and over. Someone waiting for a medical result knows this: the hours of waiting often hurt more than the news. The Advaita commentators do not tell the reader to stop thinking by force, which rarely works. They point to certainty. One who is sure of this, who has seen it in his own experience, is freed of worry by that seeing. Then three results follow, as in many verses of this text: happy, peaceful, and with wanting melted, galita-spṛha. The image of melting is gentle. Desire is left to soften and run off once the heat of worry is gone. The verse is a good one to read slowly, more than once, on an anxious evening.
Same thread in the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita 2.66Krishna asks how there can be happiness for one who has no peace.Chapter 11, Eight certainties: Eight verses, each about one who is certain of a single truth and is at peace because of it.
New to this text? Seven mornings with the Ashtavakra Gita gives you one verse a day for a week.
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.