18 · Peace

Chapter eighteen is the longest in the Ashtavakra Gita by a wide margin — roughly a hundred verses where most chapters have a handful — and the length is not accumulation. It is method. The chapter says one thing, the same thing the book has said since chapter one, and it says it a hundred ways, turning the single fact under the light until the mind, having run out of angles from which to make it into a problem, simply lets it be obvious. It is called Peace because peace, here, is not produced; it is what is left when every approach to it has been exhausted.

The chapter’s substance cannot be summarised without betraying it, because its point is the saturation, not the content. But its recurring note is the praise of effortlessness so total it includes the effort to be effortless. Again and again it returns to a figure of the free one who neither acts nor refrains, neither seeks nor avoids, is neither disturbed by the world nor at pains to be undisturbed by it — for whom even peace is not a thing attained but the absence of the one who lacked it. Liberation, the chapter keeps saying from new directions, is not an event; the bound state was the only event, and it was made of believing in the bound one.

What chapter eighteen does that the earlier chapters could not is wear the reader down in the precise place the reader resists. A short sharp verse can be admired and filed; a hundred verses circling the same point cannot be filed, because by the fortieth the mind’s strategies for keeping the fact at arm’s length — turning it into doctrine, into practice, into a future attainment — have each been named and dissolved, and there is simply nothing left to do with the sentences but undergo them. The text is not arguing the reader into peace. It is removing, one by one, every exit the reader keeps taking from it.

Held against the Bhagavad Gita, chapter eighteen is the clearest measure of the two books’ different faiths. The Gita’s longest chapter, eighteen as well, is a gathering-up of paths and a final handing of the choice back to the seeker — reflect, and do as you choose. Ashtavakra’s eighteen gathers nothing and offers no choice, because there is, in its view, no one left to be given one; it does not conclude, it dissolves. The Gita ends by empowering the chooser. Ashtavakra ends by exhausting them. The reader who took the Gita’s choice and chose, and acted, and is still, underneath, the one who chose, is who this chapter is finally for.

The danger of so long a chapter is not new but it is concentrated: a reader can mistake the experience of being verbally saturated — a kind of pleasant mental blankness induced by repetition — for the recognition itself, and walk away soothed rather than undone. The Ashtavakra Gita’s only guard against this is the one it has trusted the whole way: the honesty of the reader, checked against the reactions of life and not the afterglow of the text. Peace that is the chapter’s drone wearing off is not the peace the chapter means. The peace it means does not wear off, because it was never on.

For the honest reader chapter eighteen is not to be studied but to be passed through, slowly, without trying to extract a summary — because the attempt to extract is the self reaching for one more thing to hold, and the chapter’s length exists precisely to outlast that reach. Read it as the text intends and somewhere in it the looking-for-peace quietly stops finding the search interesting, and what remains was what the hundred verses were pointing at the entire time.

After this the dialogue has almost nowhere to go, because the questioner is nearly gone. Chapter nineteen is Janaka, asked in effect where the world and the seeking have gone, answering from inside a freedom that no longer has the equipment to take the question seriously.