The verse

Ashtavakra Gita 12.6Chapter 12, Verse 6

King Janaka

Ashtavakra Gita 12.6 is a verse from chapter 12 (How I came to rest). King Janaka speaks it to his teacher, the sage Ashtavakra. In plain English it says: "Doing rituals comes from not knowing, and so does stopping them. Knowing this truth fully, I rest as I am."

The verse

कर्मानुष्ठानमज्ञानाद् यथैवोपरमस्तथा ।बुध्वा सम्यगिदं तत्त्वमेवमेवाहमास्थितः ॥

karmānuṣṭhānamajñānād yathaivoparamastathā |budhvā samyagidaṃ tattvamevamevāhamāsthitaḥ ||

Doing rituals comes from not knowing, and so does stopping them. Knowing this truth fully, I rest as I am.

King Janaka, to Ashtavakra

Ashtavakra Gita · 12.6

Word meanings and a note for this verse are still being written. Read it in context on the chapter 12 page, or start with the verses in where to begin.

Chapter 12 of 20
How I came to rest

Chapter 12, How I came to rest: Janaka describes how body, speech and thought fell quiet one after another, and how he now rests as he is.

Read all 8 verses in this chapter →

Seven mornings of short readings from the Bhagavad Gita, chosen for what you're going through, by email.

Send my week

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.