Ashtavakra Gita

Know for certain that you are one, and that in you the world rises and falls like waves on the sea

This line introduces the ocean-and-waves image that becomes the text's dominant metaphor for how one substance can appear as many things.

This is the first appearance, in Ashtavakra's teaching voice, of an image the Gita returns to repeatedly: the self as an ocean and the phenomenal world as its waves. A wave has no existence apart from the water — it is water, temporarily shaped — and by the same logic the world has no existence apart from the one awareness in which it arises and subsides. What distinguishes this early instance from the poem's later, more famous versions of the same image, spoken by Janaka himself once the teaching has landed, is that here it is still instruction offered from sage to king rather than a first-person exclamation of astonishment. The demand for certainty ("know for certain") signals that this is meant as settled knowledge, not a devotional feeling to be cultivated.

Ashtavakra Gita