Ashtavakra Gita

The body performs its duties like a servant carrying out orders, while the true self remains the silent, untouched master of the house

The servant/master image gives a working model for daily life under this teaching — obligations still get carried out, just no longer mistaken for who is actually in charge.

Chapters six and seventeen return repeatedly to a domestic image that makes an abstract claim easy to hold onto: the body goes about its errands — eating, working, resting, responding to whatever the day requires — the way a servant carries out a household's daily tasks, competently and without needing to be consciously managed at every step. The self, meanwhile, is described as the master of that household, present and ultimately unaffected by any of it, but never confused with the servant doing the actual physical work. This division lets the text describe a fully functional, engaged life alongside total inner detachment, without asking the reader to imagine some kind of disembodied or inactive existence. It's one of the more practically oriented images in a text that otherwise deals mostly in abstraction.

Ashtavakra Gita

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• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about illness and the body failing

  The servant-and-master image is the text's most practical. Appointments are still kept and medicines still taken; what changes is that the household stops being confused with whoever is running its errands.