Ashtavakra Gita

Whether the body remains for a hundred years or ends this very moment, it makes no difference to the one who knows the self

Uses the extreme contrast between a long life and instant death to show how completely the Gita separates the self's wellbeing from the body's lifespan.

This teaching from chapter 18 makes its point through contrast rather than argument: it sets a full human lifespan of a hundred years against death occurring in the very next instant, and insists neither outcome changes anything for the person who knows the self. The claim depends on the chapter's broader premise that the self is not the body and does not end when the body does, so lifespan, however dramatically different a hundred years and one moment feel to ordinary awareness, is simply not a variable that touches what the self actually is. This is among the more demanding claims in the text, since it asks the reader to hold the prospect of imminent death with the same equanimity as a long life, grounded entirely in the prior recognition that the self was never mortal to begin with.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about grief

  This is where the teaching is hardest to receive. A hundred more years and death in the next instant are said to be equivalent — a claim that will read as cruelty to anyone sitting beside a dying person, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.