The Ashtavakra Gita, also called the Ashtavakra Samhita, is a Sanskrit dialogue on the Self in which Sage Ashtavakra teaches King Janaka of Mithila. Its 298 verses run through twenty chapters; tradition attributes it to the sage himself, and its date is uncertain. The Vana Parva of the Mahabharata tells the sage's own story: cursed in the womb by his father for faulting his recitation, he was born bent in eight parts of the body; as a boy he won a debate at Janaka's court that freed his father, and a bath in the river Samanga made his limbs straight.
It opens with Janaka's three questions — how is knowledge gained, how does liberation come, how is dispassion won? — and Sage Ashtavakra answers at once: shun the objects of the senses as poison, and take forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, contentment and truth as nectar. You are not earth, water, fire, air or space, he tells the king, but their witness, awareness itself; one who holds himself free is free, and one who holds himself bound is bound — as one thinks, so one becomes. Janaka speaks in his own voice in several chapters, and the closing chapter is his: where, he asks, is teaching or scripture, where disciple or teacher?
Sri Ramakrishna and his disciple Swami Vivekananda knew and quoted the Ashtavakra Gita, as did Sri Ramana Maharshi, and Swami Nityaswarupananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Math, translated it word by word into English. In this collection, Belur Math is the headquarters of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission that Swami Vivekananda founded, and Sri Ramana Maharshi lived from 1896 until 1950 at Thiruvannamalai, home of the Arunachaleswarar temple, by the hill of Arunachala.