Ashtavakra Gita

Special instruction on quiescence: talking of it endlessly will not free you; be quiet, and simply rest as your own self

Points out the built-in irony of a teaching about silence delivered across thousands of verses of speech, and resolves it by telling the listener to stop listening and simply rest.

Chapter 16 is traditionally introduced as "special instruction," and it opens with a pointed self-critique: discourse about stillness, however precise or beautiful, is not itself stillness, and can become one more activity the mind performs instead of the rest being described. Ashtavakra effectively tells Janaka to stop accumulating teaching and instead be quiet — a directive that works against the grain of a text built almost entirely from dialogue and argument up to this point. This mirrors a tension found across contemplative literature generally, where words are used to point past themselves, and a text sometimes has to explicitly instruct the reader to put it down. The chapter's brevity relative to others is itself in keeping with this instruction.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• Does the Ashtavakra Gita reject spiritual practice?

  Chapter sixteen turns on its own medium. Talk about stillness is not stillness, and can become one more thing the mind busies itself with.