Ashtavakra Gita

Where now is the world, where is the body, where are the senses, and where even am I myself, in this infinite silence?

The questions listed here aren't meant to be answered — asking them and finding no one left to answer is itself the verse's entire point.

This verse works through accumulation and collapse: it names the world, the body, the senses, and finally "I myself," each a category a person might fall back on if the others are stripped away, and then asks where each one has actually gone. In the infinite silence Janaka describes, none of them can be located anymore, not because they were destroyed but because none of them were ever separately real to begin with. The rhetorical structure mirrors the teaching's content — a string of questions with no answer supplied dramatizes exactly the dissolution of categories the verse is describing. It's one of the more experiential moments in chapter twenty, closer to an exclamation of astonishment than a philosophical argument.

The strategy of naming candidates for the self and then negating each one closely resembles the 'neti neti' (not this, not this) method of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.

Ashtavakra Gita