In the Ashtavakra Gita, detachment and dispassion (vairagya) are portrayed as both the hallmark and the living expression of true Self-knowledge. When one recognizes oneself as pure, unattached awareness rather than the body–mind complex, a natural loosening of clinging to objects, roles, and experiences arises. This disidentification is not primarily an outer renunciation but an inner stance in which thoughts, emotions, and circumstances are seen as passing appearances in consciousness, not as “me” or “mine.” In that light, vairagya is less a moral discipline to be laboriously cultivated and more the spontaneous fragrance of right understanding.

At the same time, the text treats attachment as the root of bondage and suffering: grasping at objects, experiences, and mental states sustains the illusion of limitation. Dispassion dissolves this grasping and reveals that bondage was never ultimately real, since the witness-consciousness remains untouched throughout all change. As attraction and aversion, pleasure and pain, gain and loss are seen as transient movements in awareness, there is a growing evenness of mind and freedom from the push and pull of duality. This freedom is not a suppression of desire but a quiet indifference born of seeing the impermanent and insubstantial nature of phenomena.

Vairagya in this teaching extends even to subtle spiritual ambitions, including the very desire for liberation, so that one ceases to struggle and simply abides as the Self. Action may continue in the realm of nature, yet the sense of “I am the doer” falls away, and with it the burden of duty as a source of identity. In this complete inner renunciation, the wise one remains established in the natural state of pure consciousness, serene and unaffected amid the play of appearances. Thus detachment and dispassion function both as the immediate gateway to Self-recognition and as the effortless condition of a life lived in the light of that recognition.