The Avadhuta Gita stands in a historical twilight where precise dates and authorship cannot be firmly fixed, yet its general milieu can be discerned. It is clearly a post-Upaniṣadic Advaita text, emerging after the major formative period of Advaita Vedānta and presupposing a mature non-dual vocabulary and renunciate culture. Scholarly estimates vary, but it is generally located in the broad medieval Advaita milieu, sometime after the era associated with Śaṅkara. The work is traditionally attributed to Dattātreya, the legendary sage-deity who embodies Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva, and who had already become an archetype of the avadhūta, the utterly free renunciate. This attribution is best understood as symbolic and hagiographical rather than strictly historical, since no securely datable author can be identified.

The religious and social setting of the text is the avadhūta and related renunciate traditions that stood at some distance from formal ritualism and social convention. These currents, often associated with the broader Avadhūta and Nāth-like milieus, emphasized radical freedom from caste identity, ritual obligation, and institutional constraints. The Avadhuta Gita reflects this ethos in its disregard for external observances and its celebration of one who has gone beyond all social and religious markers. It belongs to a stream of Advaita that privileges direct, experiential realization of non-duality over scholastic debate or elaborate ritual. In this sense, it is part of a wider movement within Advaita Vedānta that turned increasingly toward immediate insight as the heart of spiritual life.

Philosophically and literarily, the text represents a mature, uncompromising Advaita vision. It proclaims the absolute non-dual nature of Brahman and the essential identity of Ātman and Brahman, treating the world and individual identity as mere appearance. Its ecstatic, aphoristic style places it alongside other minor Advaitic gītās, such as the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā and the Ribhu Gītā, which circulated especially among renunciates and yogis. These works share a preference for mystical, paradoxical expression over systematic argumentation, and they serve as vehicles for a radical interiorization of spiritual practice. Within the broader history of Advaita, the Avadhuta Gita thus occupies a distinctive place as a voice of non-institutional, experiential non-dualism, shaped by the Dattātreya-centered devotional and ascetic currents that cherished the figure of the avadhūta as the very embodiment of liberated awareness.