Chapter-2, An Introduction

Ashtavakra Gita Chapter-2

The Marvellous Self 

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It all started in Chapter-1 when King Janaka asks the sage Ashtavakra how he can attain Knowledge, Detachment, and Liberation. Ashtavakra explains this to him through that Chapter. Upon hearing Ashtavakra’s words Janaka realizes his True Nature. In a state of sheer rapture, he describes the joy and wonder of his new state in this Chapter. 

All mystic saints when trying to verbalise their experiences of the transcendental, become mute with wonderment, at the ecstatic marvel of the very Experience Divine. Even the unusually eloquent mystics of the Upaniṣads, who have evolved to themselves a sane vocabulary and an intelligent technique of communication, are often compelled to employ a stammering diction, punctuated with endless exclamations!! 

In this chapter, in many verses, Janaka tumbles himself through jungles of exclamations!!! As a student Janaka approaches his Teacher Aṣṭāvakra in the previous chapter and the spiritually charged words springing from Master's bosom, of lived subjective experience of the Self, rocket the student into an immediate subjective experience of the Reality. The staggering uniqueness of the experience, and the breathless vividness of his direct enlightenment, chokes the student and deprives him of his eloquence. 

When a human intellect can understand and comprehend a happening, it is no more a wonder. The intellect is then satisfied by its description or explanation. But when we experience something for which our intellect cannot immediately provide with a logical explanation, the incomprehensibility of it all makes it a wonder. In moments of wonderment the intellect is stunned into a bewildering silence. Hence the Supreme is often indicated by the term ‘wonder of wonders’ : (atyāścarya mayam devam). We read this term ‘(āścarya)’ employed both in the Gīta and in the Upaniṣads.

In this chapter the ‘Joy of Realisation’ is expressed in a language at once fluid and soul stirring. The graphic diction employed here can stimulate the contemplative faculty in the students of meditation. The description of the universe, sustained and illumined by the Self, is so impressive that a sincere reflective mind can readily feel the extensive cosmos around him as nothing but an insignificant limb of his own infinite Self! To the little ego, familiar with its meagre selfish world, such an expansion of its experience within should be a staggering wonder! 

King Janaka, the disciple, in this chapter demonstrates that the words of the Master have brought into the royal bosom an immediate enlightenment. All his illusions have been suddenly lifted. The knowledge-knower-knowable triad has fused to disappear, along with the ego, into the vision of the infinite tranquillity – the Self. The description of this merger is made unforgettably vivid, by the striking examples so dexterously employed by Janaka.