Ashtavakra Gita

A man who has known the self does not perform rituals nor abandon them; he is beyond both action and its renunciation

Even the entire opposition between performing sacred duty and abandoning it collapses once someone realizes there was never a separate doer to perform or renounce anything.

In the sprawling eighteenth chapter of the Ashtavakra Gita, Ashtavakra addresses King Janaka on what living self-knowledge actually looks like day to day. Vedic religious life ran on a binary: perform your prescribed rituals (karma) or renounce the world entirely (sannyasa) — the text insists the self-realized person stands outside that choice altogether, since both options assume someone is there to choose. This is a sharper claim than the Bhagavad Gita's teaching of detached action; Ashtavakra isn't recommending a better way to act, he's saying the actor was always a fiction. A man who knows himself as awareness, not as the body performing or forgoing ceremonies, finds the whole question of ritual observance simply falls away, neither embraced nor rejected.

Unlike the Bhagavad Gita, which sanctifies action performed without attachment, the Ashtavakra Gita treats the entire action/inaction distinction itself as a construct to be seen through rather than skillfully managed.

Ashtavakra Gita