000.Introduction

 This is a collection of extracted text in English from a book titled Ashtavakra Samhita authored by Swami Nityaswarupananda ISBN 978-81-85301-13-6  a publication of Advaita shrama 5 Delhi Entally Road, Kolkata 700 014.

A short introduction : 

Ashtavakra (Sanskrit: अष्टावक्रः, IAST: Aṣṭāvakraḥ) or Ushtaavukruhu is a revered Vedic sage in Hinduism. His name literally means "eight deformities", reflecting the eight physical deformities he was born with. His maternal grandfather was the Vedic sage Aruni, his parents were both Vedic students at Aruni's school. Ashtavakra studied, became a sage and a celebrated character of the Hindu Itihasa epics and Puranaas - Source - Wikipedia


The story goes that King Janaka accepts twelve year old Ashtavakra as his Guru and seeks to know the reality of human existence, upon listening to Ashtavakra admonishing the learned scholars in Janaka’s court for they ridiculing his colour and distorted body shape, instead of treating him an equal as a manifestation of the same Universal One-ness as they themselves were. Incidentally Ashtavakra  visited the court of Janaka at the behest of his mother to tell his father who himself was a learned scholar participating in a heated spiritual debate that food was ready and that he should come home.

I went through many texts on Ashtavakra Samhita, popularly referred to as Ashtavakra Gita and found the one authored by Swami Nityaswarupananda to be simple and easy to understand. I then proceeded to extract the english test for readers to understand the content with ease. 

I am now sharing the content in English for ease of reading before proceeding to read the content in Sanskrit and Hindi as well. 

The Ashtavakra Gita is presented in 20 chapters with 307 verses in all. 

The blogs are arranged as 01 series and 02 series. The 01 series are blogs with content of the verses without explanatory notes and the 02 series blogs with content of verses alongwith explanatory notes. Each of the blogs are chapters of the Ashtavakra Gita.

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