A text that begins by refusing your question
Janaka, the philosopher-king, opens the Ashtavakra Gita with three questions: How is knowledge attained? How is liberation reached? How is renunciation achieved? These are the questions every seeker eventually arrives at, shaped carefully, posed with the seriousness of a man who has tried everything else. Ashtavakra's reply does not answer them. It dissolves them. You are not the body, he says in the third verse. Not the earth, water, fire, air, or space that compose it. You are the witness of all these things, awareness itself, and you have always been free. The bondage you are asking how to escape is not a condition. It is a misidentification.
