u/thisisashukla

I'm a data scientist building a scripture app. The pipeline ended up processing the full shloka corpus of the Ashtavakra Gita (298 verses), Avadhuta Gita (271), Ram Gita (62), and several others. Tagging and scoring them for non-duality, witness-consciousness, and liberation themes surfaced something worth sharing: these three texts all point to the witness-self, but the entry point is different in each.

Ashtavakra works by systematic negation of identity — caste, life-stage, sensory experience, all stripped away. What's left is described as formless, unattached, the witness of the universe. The verse is na tvaṃ viprādiko varṇo... viśvasākṣī sukhī bhava — "knowing this, be happy." Happiness not as goal but as the natural state of the witness recognizing itself. The scoring on pure awareness and non-attachment tags was the highest of any text in the corpus.

Avadhuta doesn't argue toward the witness — it speaks as the witness already established. The structural pattern in the data is clear: negation of what he is not (fate, mind, ego), then a refrain about being "gyanamritam, steady as the sky." It reads like the Ashtavakra conclusion without the buildup. Different tool for a different stage of practice.

Ram Gita takes the most analytical route — distinguishing the jiva (consciousness reflected in intellect born from avidya) from atman (the witness, separate from intellect and beyond its distinctions). Closest to traditional Advaita scaffolding. Most useful for someone who needs the conceptual map before the direct pointing.

Full writeup with the top-scoring verses from all 7 Gitas: https://www.wisdomquotes.in/blogs/beyond-bhagavad-gita-quotes-mental-spiritual-health

For those working with these texts in practice: which entry point has been most useful — the systematic negation of Ashtavakra, the first-person declaration of Avadhuta, or the analytical framework of the Ram Gita?

Building the Wisdom app meant running a data pipeline across a lot of scripture — not just the 700 verses of the Bhagavad Gita but hundreds more from texts most people have never opened: Ashtavakra Gita, Avadhuta Gita, Ram Gita, Hans Gita, Shakti Gita, Shambhu Gita, Vishnu Gita.

After tagging every verse for themes like equanimity, non-attachment, fear, suffering, and witness-consciousness, some patterns became hard to ignore. A few things that surfaced:

• The Ashtavakra Gita (298 verses) ranked highest for equanimity and witness-consciousness tags. Nearly every verse is stripping away another layer of identity until only the witness remains.
• The Hans Gita is only 46 verses but nearly a third of them score high on anger-regulation and tolerance. Unusually dense on that theme for its size.
• The Avadhuta Gita has a recurring structural pattern: Dattatreya names something he is not (the suffering, the ego, the mind born from pain), then names what he is — "the nectar of wisdom, steady and like the sky." That negation→recognition move appears across dozens of verses.
• The Vishnu Gita has a verse on craving and aversion that's almost word-for-word what ACT therapy describes as psychological inflexibility.
• The Shambhu Gita is 985 verses — the largest corpus. One verse in chapter 6 describes fear not as something to overcome but something that dissolves by merging back into its own source. Different mechanism than anything in the other texts.

Wrote it all up with Sanskrit, translation, and what each verse actually says practically: https://www.wisdomquotes.in/blogs/beyond-bhagavad-gita-quotes-mental-spiritual-health

Curious whether anyone here has worked with any of these texts — which ones and what's been useful.

Okay so this genuinely surprised me when I first found out.
We all know the Bhagavad Gita. It’s basically the book — Krishna, Arjuna, middle of a battlefield, existential crisis, cosmic wisdom. Most of us had it in our homes growing up even if we never fully read it.
But the format of a Gita — a wise teacher, a sincere seeker, a deep conversation — was so powerful that it shows up again and again across the Mahabharata, the Puranas, the Upanishads. There are over a number of Gitas in our tradition. Most of us have never heard of the others.
Here are some I came across:

🌿 Anu Gita — Arjuna asks Krishna to repeat the Bhagavad Gita because he forgot it. Krishna basically says “bro I can’t recreate that, but here’s the essence.”
🔥 Ashtavakra Gita — A physically deformed sage walks into a royal court and dismantles everyone’s ego with pure Advaita. The king attains liberation mid-conversation.
🐦 Uddhava Gita — Krishna’s goodbye teachings to his closest friend Uddhava. Possibly the most emotionally heavy Gita there is.
🌊 Ribhu Gita — One sage. One truth. “I am Brahman.” Repeated from every angle until it lands in your bones.
💀 Yama Gita — The god of death himself teaches the path to liberation. Which honestly makes him the most qualified teacher possible.
🌺 Devi Gita — Same energy as the Bhagavad Gita but the Goddess is the one revealing her cosmic nature. Absolutely stunning text.
🌸 Vyadha Gita — A butcher teaches a brahmin monk about dharma and devotion. The most subversive and underrated one in the entire list.
🕊️** Kapila Git**a — The founder of Samkhya philosophy explains how the universe works. To his own mother. Over dinner probably.
🌙 Shiva Gita — Shiva teaches Ram the nature of reality before the battle with Ravana. Ram sitting at Shiva’s feet is a beautiful image.
.

My 4 month old boy has been taking less milk for the past two days and today he is refusing it completely. we are also giving him Iron drops. That might be causing digestion issues. So we will stop that for a few days and see.

Would be great if anyone can share if they have faced similar issue at this age.

I asked dadly. it says we need to monitor it and try feeding in more calm situations.

https://preview.redd.it/fqr2hvc2kj0h1.jpg?width=1448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b924cf9347f799a72b7901ceb5d1535cdf33519

I've been spending a lot of time with the Gita lately and kept running into the same frustration — most online versions are cluttered with ads, paywalls, or hard to navigate on mobile.

So I put together a simple reading experience at wisdomquotes.in/gita with the full Bhagavad Gita — all 18 chapters, verse by verse, with Sanskrit, Hindi and English meaning. No ads, no signup, just the text.

It's still a work in progress and I'd genuinely love feedback from people who engage with the Gita seriously. Are there translations or commentaries you'd like to see included? Anything that would make it more useful for study or daily reading?

Happy to hear what this community thinks. 🙏

https://preview.redd.it/3to6cgsg540h1.jpg?width=1448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=78417cbc8c589f854495516d31b66bc4a4803443

https://preview.redd.it/novxp87d540h1.jpg?width=1448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d35e5c1479fc85592aaff5a51e275b1e1e0bb7c

I've been spending a lot of time with the Gita lately and kept running into the same frustration — most online versions are cluttered with ads, paywalls, or hard to navigate on mobile.

So I put together a simple reading experience at wisdomquotes.in/gita with the full Bhagavad Gita — all 18 chapters, verse by verse, with Sanskrit, Hindi and English meaning. No ads, no signup, just the text.

It's still a work in progress and I'd genuinely love feedback from people who engage with the Gita seriously. Are there translations or commentaries you'd like to see included? Anything that would make it more useful for study or daily reading?

Happy to hear what this community thinks. 🙏

Hey dads-to-be,

During my wife’s pregnancy, I found myself quietly panicking over things I didn’t fully understand — scan reports, symptom changes, reduced movement, medical terms, random numbers on reports, all of it.

A lot of those questions happened late at night, when my wife was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her up with my anxiety. I also didn’t want to Google myself into a full-blown spiral.

So I wrote an honest piece about what that experience felt like from the dad’s side — trying to stay calm, be useful, understand what’s happening, and not add more stress to your partner.

Sharing it here in case it helps another expecting dad feel a little less alone:

Link: https://www.dadlyapp.com/blog/i-asked-ai-every-question-pregnancy

Not medical advice, obviously. More of a “you’re not the only one sitting awake at 2am trying to decode pregnancy” kind of post.

Would genuinely love to know if other dads here went through this too — especially around scan anxiety or feeling responsible for understanding everything.

Everyone knows it. Most people use it to mean: work hard and don't worry about outcomes. That's not wrong exactly, but I think it's missing the actual weight of what Krishna is saying.

The Sanskrit is ma phaleshu kadachana — never let the fruits be your motive. The word is phala, fruit. And this isn't a productivity tip or a stoic reframe on anxiety. Krishna is making a deeper metaphysical claim: the action doesn't ultimately belong to you, because the "you" who would own it is itself a construction.

The detachment he's pointing at isn't emotional distance. It's more radical — it's about dissolving the identity that would be attached in the first place.

Which is why the karma teaching in Chapter 3 can only make sense after the Sankhya teaching in Chapter 2. One without the other sounds like either fatalism or self-help advice.

I tried to work through what karma actually means in the Gita rather than how it gets used in popular spirituality: https://www.wisdomquotes.in/blogs/bhagwat-geeta-chapter-2

What's your reading of it? I'm especially curious whether people find the karma yoga teaching practical or whether it only makes sense as part of the jnana framework.

Everyone knows it. Most people use it to mean: work hard and don't worry about outcomes. That's not wrong, but it's missing the actual weight of what Krishna is saying.

The word is phala — fruit. And the instruction isn't about emotional detachment. It's about who the action belongs to. Krishna is making a metaphysical claim about the self, not a productivity tip.

Wrote something trying to get at what karma actually means in the Gita rather than how it gets used in pop spirituality: https://www.wisdomquotes.in/blogs/bhagwat-geeta-chapter-2

What's your reading of it?