Ashtavakra Gita

The man who is free needs no scripture and no teacher any longer, having found the source from which all scriptures spring

Scripture and teachers are treated as a ladder that becomes unnecessary the moment it has done its job, not as permanent authorities to keep consulting.

The Ashtavakra Gita is itself scripture, which makes this claim self-aware: chapter eighteen says the person who has actually reached self-knowledge no longer needs texts or teachers, having found the very source that scriptures were only ever pointing toward secondhand. This mirrors a common move in Vedantic literature, where the words of the Upanishads are described as fingers pointing at the moon, useful only until the moon itself is seen. It isn't a dismissal of scripture's value for someone still searching — Janaka himself needed Ashtavakra's words to wake up in the text's opening chapter — but a statement about what becomes unnecessary once the search has actually ended.

The 'pointing at the moon' device is a long-standing convention in Vedantic exegesis, used to explain why texts like this one are meant as provisional aids rather than final objects of belief.

Ashtavakra Gita