The Avadhūta Gītā: Dattātreya’s Song of the Free

An introduction for the first-time reader, with the full English text — eight chapters, 271 verses, with notes — as a PDF at the end.

“The essence and the whole of Vedānta is this Knowledge, this supreme Knowledge: that I am by nature the formless, all-pervasive Self.”

That is the whole book in one verse. Everything after it is the same thing said again — from another side, in another key — until it stops being a sentence you have read and starts being something you notice.

What it is

The Avadhūta Gītā is a short Sanskrit poem, eight chapters and a little over two hundred and seventy verses in the edition given here, attributed to Dattātreya: the sage India remembers as the teacher of teachers, the one who said he had learned from twenty-four gurus — the earth, the wind, a python, a moth, a courtesan, a child. Nobody knows when it was written down. Scholars guess the ninth or tenth century; the tradition says far older; the ideas in it are as old as the Upaniṣads. The Nāth yogis count it among their foundational texts, and Swami Vivekananda read from it to his students at Thousand Island Park in the summer of 1895.

Gītā means song. Avadhūta is harder. The verb behind it, ava-dhū, means to shake off — dust from a cloth, water from a dog’s coat. An avadhūta is someone who has shaken everything off: possessions, roles, rules, and finally the idea of being a separate person at all. So: the song of the one who has shaken it all off. The usual English is “Song of the Free.”

The last chapter spells the word out letter by letter, and it is the plainest description of such a person I know:

• A free from the noose of hopes; pure in the beginning, the middle and the end; dwelling always in joy.
• VA one by whom all desires have been let go, whose speech is wholesome, and who lives in the present.
• DHŪ limbs grey with dust, mind washed clean, free of disease, and released even from the practice of concentration and meditation.
• TA one in whom the thought of Truth has been made steady, who is free of schemes and effort, of ignorance and egoism.

— after Avadhūta Gītā 8.6–9

What it says, in plain words

Most spiritual books tell you what to do. This one tells you what you are, and then asks, over and over, why you are still weeping.

Its claim is the claim of Advaita, nonduality, and it fits in a few sentences. There is one awareness, and it is not divided. The feeling of being a small separate self looking out at a world of other things is a mistake of perception — not a sin, not a flaw, a mistake, like taking a mirage for water. Fear, grief and insecurity all grow from that one mistake, because a self that is limited can be lost. Remove the mistake and there is nothing left to fear, and nothing to attain, because what you were looking for is the one who was looking. The very first verse says the desire for this knowledge arises “to save them from great fear,” and the note on it is worth the whole introduction: fear here includes insecurity, despair and grief, “all of which arise from a consciousness of oneself as limited and separate from others.”

The poem’s own pictures are better than any paraphrase. A clay pot is broken; the space that was “inside” it was never separate from the space outside:

When the pot is broken, the space within it is absorbed in the infinite space and becomes undifferentiated. When the mind becomes pure, I do not perceive any difference between the mind and the supreme Being.

Avadhūta Gītā 1.31

Water is poured into water; where is the line between them?

As water, when water has been poured into water, has no distinctions, so puruṣa and prakṛti appear non-different to me.

Avadhūta Gītā 1.51

And the sky, which the poem returns to more than any other image: untouched by the clouds that pass through it, not made smaller by a wall, not made dirty by smoke. “Like the sky” is the text’s favourite way of saying what you are.

Because its starting point is “you are already that,” the poem is cheerfully ruthless with everything that assumes you are not. Caste, stage of life, scripture, ritual, worship, even teacher and disciple — all are set aside, not as wrong but as beside the point (1.34, 2.32–35). It will not even let you keep meditation: if the Self is what you are, who is meditating on what? (1.23, 1.58). Read quickly, that sounds like a licence to do nothing. It is not. The translator’s note on 1.26 says what the tradition has always said: if you do not yet know the Self, meditation is the way; once you know it, you will stop of your own accord. Chapter Two even lays out how to practise, from gross objects to subtle ones to no object at all (2.15–16). The poem is written from the far end of that road, and it describes the view from there.

It is also careful not to let you make a new belief out of it. “Some seek nonduality, others duality. They do not know the Truth, which is the same at all times and everywhere, which is devoid of both duality and nonduality” (1.36). And at the close of the third chapter: “Renounce the world in every way. Renounce renunciation in every way. Renounce the poison of renunciation and non-renunciation” (3.46). Nonduality held as an opinion is one more thing to shake off.

How it is built

It is a song, and it works like one. Chapter One is the long opening, seventy-six verses that lay out the whole teaching and address the listener — and sometimes the poet’s own mind — as “my child.” Chapter Two is about teachers (take the truth from whoever has it: “does anyone shun a gem that has fallen in an impure place?”), about practice, and about what becomes of such a person at death. Then the refrains begin. Chapter Three closes every verse with the same line:

Chapter Four ends each verse “I am free from disease — my form has been extinguished”; Chapter Five, “Why dost thou, who art the identity in all, grieve in thy heart?”; Chapter Six, “If there is only one indivisible, all-comprehensive Absolute, how can there be…?” — and then a pair of opposites: day and night, sun and fire, you and I. The refrains are not padding. They are the bell. By the thirtieth “like the sky” something in you has stopped arguing.

The word the translator renders as “homogeneous” is samarasa — literally “one taste,” the same flavour all the way through — and the Nāth tradition took it as its own name for the goal. Chapter Seven describes the one who lives there: in rags or in nothing, in an empty house, unwilling to argue, “he wanders leisurely, filled with the spontaneous joy of his own mind” (7.9). Chapter Eight, which many scholars think was added later, gives a gentler portrait of the sage — self-controlled, moderate in eating, friendly to all, compassionate — then the four letters above, and then a promise: whoever reads or hears this song is not born again.

How to read it

Not quickly, and not as an argument. A few suggestions from someone who keeps coming back to it:

• Read one chapter at a sitting, aloud if you can. The refrains are made for the ear.
• When a verse says “there is no body, no mind, no teacher,” do not take it as a claim about the world to be weighed and disputed. Take it as a pointing-away: look at what is there before those labels.
• Notice how often the text asks a question — “Why do you weep?” “How can there be…?” — and let the question stand rather than answering it.
• Expect to be contradicted. The poem denies duality, then denies nonduality, then denies the denial. That is the method, not a fault in the manuscript.
• Keep the notes. They are short, and they rescue the hard verses — on samādhi, on the “fourth state,” on the three kinds of initiation.

For readers of Jyotiṣa

Dattātreya is Guru in person: the three-faced sage who is Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva in one body, with the four dogs at his feet that are the four Vedas and the cow that is the earth. His day is Thursday, the day of Bṛhaspati, and Datta Jayantī is kept on the full moon of Mārgaśīrṣa, in December. If Jupiter is strong in your chart, or you are passing through a Guru daśā and find yourself drawn to questions with no practical use whatever, this is the sort of text that tends to arrive.

The text

Here is the English text entire — eight chapters, with the notes — set as a single PDF for reading on a screen or printing. The English follows Swami Ashokananda’s rendering, published by the Sri Ramakrishna Math, which is the one most English readers have met.

Read it, and then put it down and look at the sky.