Ashtavakra Gita

The wise are not proud of virtue, nor ashamed of wrongdoing, seeing in both only the appearance of the one changeless self

Moral self-judgment itself gets dissolved here, not by excusing wrongdoing but by locating the doer of both virtue and vice in the same borrowed costume.

This verse is easy to mistake for moral indifference, so its logic matters: Ashtavakra isn't saying good and bad actions are equivalent, he's saying the sense of "I did well" or "I did wrong" both depend on identifying with the body-mind as the doer. Once that identification is seen through, praise and self-reproach lose their object — there's no one left standing to take credit or blame. The eighteenth chapter frames this as a natural consequence of self-knowledge rather than a discipline to be practiced: you don't train yourself out of pride and shame, you simply stop finding a self there for either one to stick to. It's a description of the sage's inner life, not a permission slip for how anyone should act in the world.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about wanting to be admired

  The sharpest move here: pride in your virtue and shame at your wrongdoing run on the same machinery, since both need a doer to stick to. It is a description of the sage's inner life, not a permission slip — the text is careful about that distinction and readers often are not.