Ashtavakr

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The Ashtavakra Gita

Health

Uma Ram and KS Ram, March 12, 2024: The Times of India


Health generally is assumed to relate to body-care, internal and external. A broader view includes mental health. Radically different from all this, is the Indic view of health, encapsulated in the Sanskrit word, swasthya. And ironically, Ashtavakra, the sage with eight deformities, presents this ideal.

Rather than feel embarrassed by these deformities, as most probably would, Ashtavakra exclaims in ecstasy: ‘Wonderful, wonderful am I!’ Why? Because, deformities notwithstanding, he was perfectly swastha. And he gives us insight into what true health means, or should mean. His Ashtavakra Gita is a classic of Sanskrit literature. It is structured as a dialogue between the guru-poet and the royal sage, Janak. Janak poses three questions to Ashtavakra: How can jnana, knowledge, be acquired? How can mukti, liberation, be attained? How is vairagya, renunciation, possible? In the course of answering these questions, Ashtavakra discourses on various topics, all anchored in Advaita, the Indian ideal of monism, revolving around the central topic of the SELF. With a total of 298 verses, spread over 20 chapters of varying lengths, Ashtavakra Gita is less than half the size of the Bhagwad Gita. The two works complement each other.


When he first approached Sri Ramakrishna, the young Vivekananda, then known as Narendra, was under the influence of Brahmo Samaj, averse to the idea of Advaita, that equates the SELF to God. Sri Ramakrishna, however, divined that the young man was innately rooted in Advaita. Instead of discoursing on monism, he introduced him to Ashtavakra Gita. The rest is history.


The word, Swasth, commonly connotes health or healthy, implying physical health. However, in Sanskrit, the word ‘swastha’ essentially connotes ‘established in the SELF’, swa-stitha. This connotation opens new vistas. Swastha goes well beyond the Greek ideal of wellness, defined as ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. The Greek view of health would have excluded Ashtavakra, the sage with an ‘unhealthy’ body with deformities.


Swastha does not imply a mere robust attitude to life; it implies the only true attitude to life. You are either swastha or sick; there can be no shades of grey between these two conditions.


Janak does not receive theoretical answers to his queries. The interaction with Ashtavakra makes him swastha; it establishes him in the SELF.

The swastha person is marked by tranquillity. This is due to the expulsion of both, negative and positive thoughts; antipathy as also sympathy; in short, a person who has transcended the entire horde of ‘pairs of opposites’. 


Whatever Krishn says of stithaprajna in the Bhagwad Gita applies also to a swastha person. Purged of all pairs of opposites, such a person, says Ashtavakra, displays a shoonya chitta, blank mind. Society may see him doing all the normal acts, but the swastha person is only inactive and indifferent to the circumstances, ‘like a dry leaf blown by the wind’. He sees the world as a projection of his SELF, and always abides in the SELF. He neither seeks nor avoids the world; he stays indifferent to it. He suffers no ailments, because he bides in the SELF as Atmaram. In Ashtavakra’s words, he lives like one videha, bodiless. He does not mind whether his body has eight or eighty deformities. He feels just wonderful – always.

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