The Dasha Avatar is the Puranic story of the ten incarnations of Vishnu who descends to the terrestrial world to establish stability and order, time and again. The avatars occur in a sequence – the first was matsya or fish representing life in water, followed by kurma or turtle signifying life in water and on land, then varaha or boar alluding to terrestrial life and so on. The sequence of the avatars could be taken to symbolise various stages in the evolution of life culminating in the advent of the perfect being.

    

    Contains the Sanskrit (devanagari) text, transliteration, and English translation. Notes by the translator. This version by Swami Ashokananda is the most popular translation.The singer of the Avadhuta Gita is Dattatreya, an Avadhuta, and according to the Nath Sampradaya, the work was heard and transcribed by two of Dattatreya's disciples—Swami and Kartika. Ashokananda (1893–1969) in Katz (2007: p. 47) holds that "[t]he Avadhuta Gita is a text of Vedanta representing extreme Advaita or Nondualism...", that is Advaita Vedanta with an emphasis on "extreme". As such, this text may also be considered a forerunner of Tantric literature as the themes, motif and orientation of this 'song' (Sanskrit: gita) are common to Shaivite Tantras, Buddhist Tantras and Vaishnava Agamas (which are also tantric literature) and ancient Yoga philosophy.

    It is a practical, lucid guide to peaceful living. All aspects of life--physical, mental and spiritual--are covered. The presentation is light, lively and entertaining; the ideas, illuminating. A fountain of wisdom that readers return to again and again.

    Man’s yearning for something afar finds its most vivid articulation in this novel.Prince Shamba, afflicted with leprosy, refusing to submit to fate, undertakes a long and arduous journey in quest of cure, in the course of which he comes across a wooden replica of the Sun God, the Divine Healer, in the confluence of Sindhu and Chandrabhaga and realizes that “nothing is meaningless in life”.It is fundamentally a story of man’s attempt to meet the challenge of his own self. Shamba reaches fulfillment in human existence not as a Ksatriya prince but as an outsider in the contemporary society, to which he never returns after the cure.