Ashtavakra Gita

The knower of truth is inwardly free though the body still moves through the world, like the sky untouched by the clouds that pass through it

Unlike the ocean-and-wave image, which claims identity, the sky-and-clouds image here claims only proximity without identity, things passing through without altering what they pass through.

Where the Gita's ocean-and-wave imagery makes a point about identity, the wave is nothing but water, so the world is nothing but self, the sky-and-cloud image used here makes a related but distinct point about proximity without identity: clouds are made of something other than sky, pass directly through the space the sky is, and leave no residue behind. Applied to "the knower of truth," the image suggests the world's events, everything the body does, encounters, or moves through, pass through the field of awareness the way clouds pass through open sky, without ever becoming part of what that awareness fundamentally is. This matters because chapter 6 is explicitly concerned with reconciling continued bodily action, Janaka still rules, still moves through his kingdom, with the inward freedom claimed throughout the text. Since the body's fate, whether it continues or eventually dissolves, is a cloud passing through sky rather than a change to the sky itself, that fate becomes a matter of indifference to the one who knows themselves as the sky rather than the cloud.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about freedom

  The sky is not altered by the clouds crossing it. Unlike the ocean-and-wave image used elsewhere in the text, this one claims nearness without identity.

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

  The same image does different work in chapter 6, claiming proximity without identity rather than purity. That chapter's whole concern is a man still ruling and still moving his body through the world — which is the situation of anyone managing a long illness rather than a final one.