Ashtavakra Gita

Give up the desire for release itself, for the very notion of bondage keeps alive the false idea that you are bound

Turns the Gita's critique of desire against spiritual desire specifically, arguing that even wanting liberation quietly preserves the belief that one is currently bound.

This is one of the more self-undermining moves in the Ashtavakra Gita, and it appears at a point in chapter 15 where Janaka might reasonably expect to be told how to pursue liberation more effectively. Instead Ashtavakra tells him to give up wanting it, on the grounds that the very desire for release presupposes and thereby reinforces the belief that one is bound in the first place. This is consistent with the text's framing elsewhere: if bondage was never real to begin with, a program aimed at escaping it treats an illusion as though it were solid enough to require a solution. The teaching is characteristically austere — it removes even the seeker's most sympathetic motive, spiritual longing, as one more thing standing in the way.

The move of telling a spiritual seeker to abandon even the desire for liberation has close parallels in later non-dual teachers, including twentieth-century figures such as Ramana Maharshi, who cited the Ashtavakra Gita as an influence.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about desire

  Here is the turn. Wanting liberation keeps alive the belief that you are currently bound, so the text asks you to drop that wanting too — at the exact point a reader expects to be told how to try harder.