Ashtavakra Gita

King Janaka asks the sage how knowledge, dispassion and liberation are attained

This opening exchange frames the whole text as a spontaneous dialogue between a reigning monarch and a physically unconventional sage, not a monastic instruction manual.

The Ashtavakra Gita opens with no invocation or ritual preamble but with a direct question: Janaka, king of Mithila, asks the sage Ashtavakra how knowledge (jnana), dispassion (vairagya), and liberation (moksha) are attained. That a ruling monarch, rather than a wandering ascetic, poses these questions matters, since it signals from the first line that the text's teaching will have nothing to do with abandoning one's station in life. Tradition holds that Ashtavakra himself was born with eight bodily deformities — his name means "eight bends" — yet grew into a formidable philosopher said to have bested the royal court's chief pandit, Bandi, in public debate. Janaka's three-part question becomes the frame the rest of the text works within, though Ashtavakra's very next reply will overturn the assumption built into asking it at all.

The Gita's date is genuinely uncertain, with scholarly estimates ranging from the early centuries BCE to as late as the eighth century CE, but its uncompromising non-dualism made it a touchstone for later teachers, including Ramana Maharshi.

Ashtavakra Gita