Translator's Introduction: The Mystery of Awareness

I remember the moment clearly.
I had escaped from my sisters, over the rocks and around the point. I was
barely seven. Above
me, a rough escarpment of boulders singing in the midday heat, at my feet a
rock pool of perfect,
inviolable stillness, and beyond, the blue vastness of the South Pacific.
There was no other living creature. I was by myself, barefooted, between
the cliff and the ocean.
As I squatted there, watching the reflection of the wind in the unrippled
pool, hearing its
exhilaration high above me in the bright emptiness of the sky, I became
aware for the first time
of awareness itself.
I had no name for it, but I could almost feel it, as if it had substance,
like the water in the rock
pool, or breath, like the shouting wind.
I saw that I was entirely by myself in a boundless ocean of awareness.
In the same instant I understood that awareness is the single mystery of
life, that it enfolds all
other mysteries, even the secret of the separate self.
From that moment I was indelibly astonished, and I knew that all my life I
would be pinching
myself and asking, What is awareness? Nothing else would ever command my
attention so
completely. How could it? For nothing else mattered next to the constant
pressure, the single
compulsion of this mystery.
A quarter of a century went by, and one day my teacher placed in my hands a
copy of
Mukerjee's edition of the Ashtavakra Gita. I had by then, in the ordinary
course of my seeking,
read a great deal of scripture, enough to know the truth of Ashtavakra's
admonition, halfway
through his own Song:
My child, you can talk about holy books all you like. But until you forget
everything, you will never
find yourself.
Understanding the vanity of scripture, I hardly expected Ashtavakra to
solve in a single epiphany
the mystery of awareness.
And yet, as I read his spare and simple verses, I felt that here at last
were words which in some
measure consumed my astonishment. They spoke so directly, and so modestly.
They seemed so
austere, and yet so generous. I found myself once more a child of seven,
tipped between the sea
and the sky, but hearing now in the wind's exuberance a clearer music,
touching the heart of the
mystery.
What is the rising or the vanishing of thought? What is the visible world,
or the invisible? What is
the little soul, or God Himself?
Awareness. Pure awareness. The clear space, the sky, the heart of awareness.
Ashtavakra's words begin after almost everything else has been said. They
barely touch the page.
They are often on the point of vanishing. They are the first melting of the
snow, high in the
mountains, a clear stream flowing over smooth and shining pebbles. Theirs
is the radiance of the
winter sky above Trishul, Kailash, Annapurna. My satguru, Neem Karoli Baba,
called the
Ashtavakra Gita 'the purest of scriptures'. All its beauty is in the
transparency, its enraptured
and flawless purity.
It is written as a dialogue between King Janaka, the father of Sita, and
his guru, Ashtavakra. But
this is just a literary device, unsupported by any internal drama, and I
have done away with it in
my version. The Gita has only one voice, Ashtavakra's, a voice of singular
compassion and
uncompromised clarity.
He is not concerned to argue. This is not speculative philosophy. It is a
kind of knowledge.
Ashtavakra speaks as a man who has already found his way and now wishes to
share it. His song
is a direct and practical transcript of experience, a radical account of
ineffable truths.
He speaks, moreover, in a language that is for all its modesty physical and
direct. He is not
abstract, though some translations, laboring to render his special terms
faithfully, make him
sound difficult, even abstruse.
On the contrary, Ashtavakra is very simple.
We are all one Self. The Self is pure awareness. This Self, this flawless
awareness is God. There is
only God.
Everything else is an illusion: the little self, the world, the universe.
All these things arise with the
thought 'I', that is, with the idea of separate identity. The little 'I'
invents the material world,
which in our ignorance we strive hard to sustain. Forgetting our original
oneness, bound tightly
in our imaginary separateness, we spend our lives mastered by a specious
sense of purpose and
value. Endlessly constrained by our habit of individuation, the creature of
preference and desire,
we continually set one thing against another, until the mischief and misery
of choice consume us.
But our true nature is pure and choiceless awareness. We are already and
always fulfilled.
It is easy, says Ashtavakra. You are the clear space of awareness
(cidakasa), pure and still, in
whom there is no birth, no striving, no 'I'.
Then how do we recover our original awareness? How do we dispel the
illusion of separation?
Some commentators suppose that Ashtavakra is really not concerned to answer
these questions.
For them, this Gita is a transcendent confession too pure to be useful.
Others see it as earnestly
didactic, a manual of conduct. Both are right. Ashtavakra is indeed wild,
playful, utterly
absorbed in the Self. Since words are of the mind, which arises only to
obscure awareness, words
are indeed folly. And who would teach folly?
Ashtavakra would. His is an eminently compassionate and practical madness.
Even while cutting
the ground from under our feet, he shows us at every turn what to do. With
a crazy solicitude, he
tells us how to end our Self-estrangement.
Be happy. Love yourself. Don't judge others. Forgive. Always be simple.
Don't make
distinctions. Give up the habit of choice. Let the mind dissolve. Give up
preferring and desiring.
Desire only your own awareness. Give up identifying with the body and the
senses. Give up your
attachment to meditation and service. Give up your attachment to detachment.
Give up giving up! Reject nothing, accept nothing. Be still. But above all,
be happy. In the end,
you will find yourself just by knowing how things are.
It would be perverse and humorless to suppose that just because Ashtavakra,
with his irreducible
nondualism, considers meditation merely a distracting habit, he means us to
abandon our
practice. Of course, from the perspective of unconditional freedom, where
nothing makes any
difference, meditation seems a comically self-important waste of time. But
Ashtavakra makes it
plain.
The moment a fool gives up his spiritual practices, he falls prey to
fancies and desires.
God help the seeker who presumes that since he is already and always
fulfilled, he can give up
trying.
It is all a matter of knowing. We are all indeed already perfect, but until
we know it, we had
better deal with our ignorance, and that can't be done just by listening to
words. It requires
sadhana, trying, doing what we do not wish to do. It means long, hard
self-effacing work.
The heart of Ashtavakra's advice is not to give up our practice, but to
abandon our strenuous
indolence.
Striving is the root of sorrow, he says. But who understands this?
Look at the master, he says. Who is lazier? He has trouble even blinking!
He certainly does not
run around puffing himself up looking for God or liberation, busily making
excuses for not
finding himself.
Dealing with our ignorance also means, for almost all of us, finding
someone like Ashtavakra to
help us. We cannot easily break the spell ourselves. Here again, Ashtavakra
is very practical. At
least half of the book describes the nature of the master, the man who has
found his way.
It is an austere and enchanting portrait. The master is a child, a fool, a
man asleep, a leaf
tumbling in the wind. Inside, he is utterly free. He does exactly as he
pleases. Rules mean nothing
to him. He doesn't care who makes fun of him, because he is always playing
and having a
wonderful time. He lives as if he had no body. He seems to walk on air. He
is unsmudged, like
the clear sky or the smooth and shining surface of a vast lake.
Because we are subject to the dualities which he has transcended, we
glimpse his nature only
through paradox. He sees but he sees nothing. He sees what cannot be seen.
He knows but he
knows nothing. He sleeps soundly without sleeping. He dreams without
dreaming. He is busy, but
he does nothing. He is not alive, nor is he dead.
His secret, and the ultimate paradox, is that he stands on his own. He is
completely by himself
(svasthya). Only by an absolute indepence (svatantrya) has he discovered
his absolute oneness
with all things.
Who was this Ashtavakra, this uncompromising poet and saint?
Since Ashtavakra's whole point is that individual identity is an illusion,
it is perfect irony that the
only certain thing we can say about him is that he was not Ashtavakra. He
was an anonymous
master who adopted Ashtavakra's character as he found it represented in a
number of tales in
classical Indian literature, and used it as a suitably faceless mask
through which to deliver his
gospel of self-effacement.
The best known tale, in the Mahabharata, explains how he got his name,
which means 'eight
twists'. When still in his mother's womb, Ashtavakra overheard his father
Kahoda reciting the
Vedas. Though still an unborn he already knew the scriptures, and hearing
his father's mistakes,
he called out to correct him. Kahoda was insulted and cursed him, and in
due course he was born
with deformed limbs.
Some years later, at the court of Janaka, Kahoda engaged in a debate with
the great scholar
Bandin, son of King Varuna. He was defeated, and Bandin had him drowned.
When Ashtavakra was twelve he discovered what had happened. He went at once
to Janaka's
court where he beat Bandin in a debate. Bandin then explained that his
father had not been
drowned, but had been banished to the bottom of the sea to serve King
Varuna. He released
Kahoda, who wished at once to lift the curse from his son. He told
Ashtavakra to bathe in the
river Samanga. When he came out of the water, his body was straight.
There is another story about him in the Vishnu Purana. As Ashtavakra was
performing penances
under water, celestial nymphs gathered and sang for him. He was so
delighted, he gave them a
boon: they would all marry Krishna. But when he came out of the water, the
nymphs saw his
deformities and made fun of him. Ashtavakra added a curse to the boon:
after their marriage
they would all fall into the hands of robbers. And so it happened. They all
married Krishna, but
after his death, despite the efforts of Arjuna, they were all carried off
by robbers.
The moral of both stories is, of course, that even the ugliest form is
filled with God's radiance.
The body is nothing, the Self is everything. There may be, as well, some
notion of the sacrificial
value of deformity, of the kind we find in Saint Augustine when he remarks
of the breaking of
Christ's body on the cross 'his deformity forms you.'
So the Ashtavakra Gita was written by an unknown master who took his
inspiration from the
contest between Ashtavakra and Bandin, which Ashtavakra wins by
demonstrating the absolute
oneness of God (brahmadavaitam). Though he casts his verses as a debate,
there is, as I have
said, no real dialogue. Only one voice is heard, speaking through the
assumed character and with
the borrowed yet potent authority and special facelessness of Ashtavakra.
And it is entirely
appropriate that the real master of the Gita remain forever unknown since,
as he has Ashtavakra
say of himself, for what he has become there is no name.
We not only know next to nothing about him, we cannot even be sure when he
lived. Sanskrit
was so static, especially after Panini's account of it became prescriptive,
a little before Christ,
that its literature is hard to date on linguistic evidence alone. Since we
have only the slimmest
literary, historical, or philosophical evidence besides, it is very hard to
date the Ashtavakra Gita
with any accuracy. Indian editors usually argue, with some sentimentality,
that it was written in
the same age as or just before the Bhagavad Gita, which they date to the
fifth of fourth century
B.C.E., but they generally agree that the Ashtavakra Gita comes a good deal
later still. Without
rehearsing the arguments, we may safely guess that it was written either in
the eighth century by a
follower of Shankara, or in the fourteenth century during a resurgence of
Shankara's teaching.
As a distillation of monastic Vedanta, it certainly has all the marks of
Shankara's purification of
ancient Shaivism.
Ashtavakra ends his Gita with a litany of self-dismissive questions, all of
them utterly rhetorical.
What is good or evil? Life or death? Freedom or bondage? Illusion or the
world? Creation or
dissolution? The Self or the not-Self?
The Sanskrit literally asks 'where?' rather than 'what?'
Where is the little soul, or God Himself?
Within the ever-fulfilled and ubiquitous Self there is no place for these
or any distinctions.
There is no place even for spiritual enquiry. Who is the seeker? Ashtavakra
asks. What has he
found? What is seeking and the end of seeking? These final questions
dissolve even the voice
which asks them. Who is the disciple, and who the master? With this last
gesture of self-erasure,
the nameless master is finally free to declare his real identity, which he
shares unconditionally
with all beings.
For I have no bounds.
I am Shiva.
Nothing arises in me,
In whom nothing is single,
Nothing is double.
Nothing is,
Nothing is not.
What more is there to say?
Some years ago, when we first settled in our ashram in Florida, we used to
go out riding in the
very early morning. My teacher always insisted that we take with us a
much-thumbed,
broken-backed but well-loved copy of the Ashtavakra Gita. We would saddle
our horses before
dawn and ride out along the banks of the Sebastian River. I remember the
frost glazing the
water, the ghostly breath of the horses, and on the western horizon the
thin crescent of a Shiva
moon. Once, looking back when the horses shied, I saw a panther standing in
our tracks, silent
and unafraid, smelling our voices.
Just before the sun came up we would dismount and, gathering frosted palm
fans and handfuls
of oak duff, make a fire. And as the sun rose above the bright water we
read aloud from the Gita.
It is easy.
God made all things.
There is only God.
When you know this
Desire melts away.
Clinging to nothing,
You become still. . . .

Thomas Byrom
Kashi Foundation
July 1989