Ashtavakra Gita

What use is wealth, what use are friends, what use are scriptures, to a man who has known himself as consciousness itself?

Ranks the things a spiritual seeker typically prizes — money, relationships, textual learning — against direct self-knowledge, and finds them beside the point once that knowledge is present.

This rhetorical question closes out chapter 9's argument by listing three things a person conventionally works hardest to secure — wealth, friendship, and scriptural learning — and asking what any of them add to someone who has already recognized their own nature as consciousness itself. The point is not that these things are bad, but that they are all instrumental, valued for the security or satisfaction they are hoped to deliver; once that satisfaction is found to be the seeker's own nature, the instruments lose their urgency. Even scripture, the very medium carrying this teaching, is placed on the list of things eventually rendered unnecessary — a structural admission, common in Advaita texts, that the teaching points beyond itself. Janaka, notably, is a king with all three already in abundance, which is part of what makes the question land.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about wanting to be admired

  Chapter 9 lists the three things people work hardest to secure — wealth, friends, scriptural learning — and asks what any of them add. Scripture is on that list, including this text, which is the Gita conceding it points past itself.