Chapter-9, Verse 2

Ashtavakra Gita Verse 9.2

कस्यापि तात धन्यस्य लोकचेष्टावलोकनात्। जीवितेच्छा बुभुक्षा च बुभुत्सोपशमं गताः॥२॥

2. Rare indeed, my son, is that blessed person whose passion for living, desire to enjoy and hunger to learn and know have been extinguished by observing the ways of men. 

Aṣṭāvakra addresses Janaka, with infinite love as ‘my son’, and sympathetically exclaims how man, though he lives in this world, all the time amidst the clamorous sorrows of others, fails to understand the calamitous life lived by people in selfish passions, in fruitless tragedies and in barren sorrows. 

This is happening everywhere around everyone, all the time, openly, for anyone to see! Yet, the deluded individual egos refuse to read these words of warning, written so clearly on the walls of life. In our identification with the body, mind and intellect, we pant to gain, to enjoy and to know. 

The physical personality in us is excited with its passion for living (jīvita-icchā); the psychological entity in us is drowned in the desire to enjoy (bubhukṣā); and the intellectual man in us is ever hungry to learn and to know (bubhutsā). Rare indeed is that intelligent man who looks around, recognises the hollowness of life and cultivates his indifference to the world and its destinies. 

The majority of us will have to get into the scorching embrace of māyā and experience its suffocating agonies, repeatedly many times, in order to realise that the world of sense objects and a life of sense gratifications cannot satisfy the deeper yearning for a permanent bliss in us. 

In short, a purified mind alone can, in its subtle perception, discover a smartness in itself to cultivate indifference to the world of sense pleasures, by intelligently observing the world of tears and sobs that is screaming at all times, all around him. 

But alas! the majority is intellectually blind and deaf. They see, but do not comprehend, they hear, but do not listen to what they hear.