Ashtavakra Gita

Whether the body dissolves in space or remains active, what does it matter to me, the formless self, whose nature does not increase or decrease

The phrase "does not increase or decrease" names a specific completeness attributed to the self, which is why even the body's eventual end changes nothing about it.

The phrase "does not increase or decrease" names a property later Vedanta calls purnatva, completeness or fullness, a nature that cannot be added to by gain nor diminished by loss, since it was never partial or quantifiable to begin with. This verse draws the direct consequence of that property for the most consequential event a body faces: if the self's completeness cannot be affected by what happens to the body, the body's eventual dissolution "in space," a phrase evoking the classical account of the body returning to earth, water, fire, air, and space, carries no more metaphysical weight than the body's continuing to act. This is not a claim that death is unimportant to the body or to those around it, but specifically that it makes no difference to what the self actually is, which, as the sky-and-clouds image of the preceding verse establishes, was never identical with the body's continuation in the first place. Positioned at the head of a chapter concerned with reconciling ongoing embodied life with inward freedom, this verse states the extreme case directly: even the body's ending changes nothing, since nothing about the self was ever contingent on the body's presence.

Ashtavakra Gita

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

  The phrase 'does not increase or decrease' names what later Vedanta calls purnatva, completeness. The verse is not claiming that a body's dissolution is unimportant to the body or to the people around it, only that it changes nothing about what the self is.