No Bragging about God or Enlightenment: Meditations on Ashtavakra Gita and Tradition
The Ashtavakra Gita is a classic of nondualism that appears shocking to many outsiders and quite offensive to literallyminded. However, when read in the context of tradition of which it is a flowering all the key reservations about it get dissolved. If we keep in mind the following points while reading it, it appears neither new nor unorthodox and it is no wonder that such great saints as Ramakrishna used to refer to it without any hesitation. It does appear addressed to elite intellectual and spiritual audience and presupposes certain basics to have been already cleared. These include transcendence of the attachment to senses or desires and thus removing of key hurdle of ego and passions that veil or distort truth. All the hard discipline of which traditions talk is presupposed by the sage Ashtavakra. What he questions is attachment to beliefs which we find in other sages as well such as Sankara, Ibn Arabi and Eckhart. What he emphasizes is freedom from imposed constructions that we f