Ashtavakra Gita

You are not the body, nor is the body yours; you are not the doer, nor the enjoyer

This separates disowning the body as one's identity from neglecting the body itself — the claim is about category, not conduct.

In a single breath, this verse strips away both the ordinary identification with the physical body and the deeper identification with being an agent who acts and reaps consequences (karta-bhokta). Ashtavakra is not recommending bodily neglect; he is naming a category error, since the body is an object of experience, made of the same elements as any other object, and so cannot be the experiencer itself. The same move applies to doership: even a body that visibly acts, eats, and suffers outcomes is, in this teaching, a process occurring within awareness, not the awareness that knows it. Chapter 1 places this claim early because everything that follows — the witness, the sea of waves, the letting-go of imagined bondage — depends on first separating "what I am" from "what happens to and through this body," an extreme version of the older Upanishadic method of neti neti, "not this, not this."

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about illness and the body failing

  Here is the claim under the story, and it is narrower than it sounds. Ashtavakra is naming a category error — the body is an object of experience, so it cannot be the experiencer — not recommending that you neglect it.