Watch a man walk toward you across a field. Naked, matted hair, alone, no possessions, women pulling their children away.
Ask two different people what they're looking at and you'll get two different answers, and both of them will be correct.
One will say: a realized being, beyond the need for anything.
The other will say: a man everyone has given up on.
The Bhāgavata gives us Śuka in exactly this ambiguous shape, walking toward Parīkṣit's death-assembly, and it does not resolve which description is the real one — because, on Debroy's own gloss, both are packed into the single word used for him.
The word is avadhūta, and here's the note:
An avadhuta is an ascetic who has renounced all worldly attachments. However, it also has the nuance of someone who has been cast off from society and has been excluded by it.1
Read that twice, because it's doing something unusual for a translator's gloss. It isn't disambiguating — picking the sense that fits the context and setting the other aside. It's telling you the word carries both at once, that a single Sanskrit term does double duty for "transcended society" and "rejected by society," and offering no way to tell, from the word alone, which one is operating in any given sentence.
The body text that uses the word doesn't resolve it either:
He was surrounded by children and was attired like an avadhuta.2
And a chapter earlier, describing him mid-journey:
He was naked. His curly hair was dishevelled. His arms were long. His complexion was like that of the best among the immortals.3
Naked, matted, alone but for children trailing him — every visible fact in the description is compatible with both readings. Nothing in what's seen settles what's meant.
It would be tidy to say the ambiguity is neutral — two equally valid lenses, pick whichever suits your temperament. But look closer and they pull in opposite directions on the single question that matters most in this scene: why is nobody stopping him?
If he's an avadhūta-as-transcendent, nobody stops him because he's beyond needing anything society could offer or withhold. The exclusion, if you want to call it that, is voluntary and irrelevant to him.
If he's avadhūta-as-outcast, nobody stops him because society already decided, and the decision was made to him, not by him. The nakedness isn't freedom from possessions; it's the absence of anyone willing to clothe him.
Those are not two flavors of the same fact. One puts all the agency inside the man. The other puts all of it outside him, in a society that has already rendered a verdict he had no say in. The text hands you both without telling you which agent is actually operating — and, crucially, there is no scene anywhere in the surrounding chapters where Śuka explains himself, defends the choice, or narrates how he got here. He simply arrives, already in this state, already unexplained.
There is one piece of information that leans the scene toward the transcendent reading, and it's worth taking seriously precisely because it's almost decisive and still not quite.
He was completely at peace, he seated himself. His intelligence was complete.4
Complete. Not developing, not striving, not partway there. If the text meant to describe a man society had discarded and who was, underneath the discarding, still working something out, this is an odd place to say his intelligence has already arrived at its endpoint.
But notice what this detail doesn't do: it doesn't erase the outcast reading, it just outranks it in this particular sentence. A person can be genuinely complete in realization and also be someone who, from outside, reads exactly like a man with nothing and no one. The text's report of his inner completeness is not evidence against the social description — it's a claim about a different layer entirely, one the apsaras and the villagers have no access to and never will.
Which means the ambiguity survives even the strongest disambiguating detail available. The intelligence is complete. The clothing is still absent. Both are true at once, and the text lets them sit that way.
It's worth asking why a translator this careful about disclosure — Debroy flags dozens of ambiguities across this volume and usually settles on a working choice for the English — leaves this one genuinely open rather than picking a side and moving on, the way he does with most of the volume's other double meanings.
The likely answer is that picking a side here would cost something the ambiguity itself is protecting. If the note said "renunciate, not outcast," it would quietly reassure the reader that everyone who looks abandoned and dispossessed is secretly fine, secretly complete, secretly beyond needing anything — which lets the reader off the hook for ever wondering about the ones who aren't. If it said "outcast, not renunciate," it would strip Śuka of the very quality the rest of the volume is built to establish about him. Neither resolution is free. The double gloss keeps both costs live rather than paying one of them on the reader's behalf.
You know someone — or you are someone — who has ended up outside the ordinary arrangements. No job, no fixed address, no visible plan, and people have quietly stopped expecting anything different.
The instinct is to force a verdict: either this is a person in genuine trouble who needs rescuing, or this is a person who has found something the rest of us haven't and doesn't need our concern. Notice that instinct and resist acting on it immediately, because the scene argues the two are not always distinguishable from where you're standing — and, more uncomfortably, that they may not always be distinguishable from where the person themselves is standing either.
What you can do instead: attend to the layer the text actually claims access to, which isn't circumstance — it's peace. Not whether things look settled, but whether the person occupying the unsettled circumstances seems to be at rest inside them or straining against them. That's a harder thing to read than a resume or an address, and you will get it wrong sometimes. But it's the only axis the passage offers as a genuine tiebreaker, and it requires actually being with the person rather than assessing their situation from a distance — which is precisely what the villagers in the story never do, and precisely what Parīkṣit, to his credit, does do in the next chapter.
There's a silence in this passage worth naming directly rather than filling in.
Nobody in the text — not the narrator, not Parīkṣit, not the assembled sages — asks Śuka how he came to be like this. No backstory, no account of a decision made, no scene of him choosing renunciation over some other available life. He simply is, already, fully formed in this condition, from his first appearance.
That silence is doing something. A story about a man who chose transcendence would need an origin — a moment of turning away. A story about a man society discarded would also need one — a moment of rejection. The Bhāgavata supplies neither, and the effect is to make the ambiguity load-bearing rather than incidental: the text is not withholding an answer it has. It has structured the scene so that the question of origin never comes up, which is a stranger and more deliberate silence than simple omission.
One more thing worth stating plainly before moving to what's unresolved: the two senses of avadhūta are not actually mutually exclusive, even though they feel like they should be.
A person can be genuinely cast off by a society that had no use for him, and have made something real out of that condition — arrived, through no path anyone would have chosen for him, at the same completeness a deliberate renunciate reaches by choice. The rejection would be the occasion rather than the cause, and the completeness wouldn't need to retroactively justify the rejection or explain it away. Read this way, the double meaning of the word isn't describing two different men who might be standing on that road. It's describing one man for whom the question of which came first — the exclusion or the peace — has stopped mattering, which is a different and stranger claim than either reading taken alone.
The strongest evidence is the endnote's own refusal to choose. Debroy could have picked a single English word — "renunciate," "ascetic," "outcast" — and translated silently. Instead he flags both senses explicitly, in a note that exists precisely because the ambiguity is real and worth a reader's attention.
Tension — "complete" intelligence against an entirely unexplained arrival. As worked above: the strongest evidence for the transcendent reading (his completeness) coexists with zero narrative account of how he got there, which is exactly the shape you'd expect from the outcast reading (no one asked, because no one who discards someone typically inquires into their inner state afterward). Preserved, not resolved.
Open question. Does the ambiguity resolve anywhere later in the volume, once Śuka begins speaking at length to Parīkṣit? Or does the text intend for the reader to carry both readings all the way through his ninety chapters of teaching, never settling which kind of figure is delivering them?
This vault's broader renunciation material tends to assume the ascetic's social invisibility is chosen and therefore untroubling — a side effect of transcendence rather than a cost of it. This passage, read with Debroy's note taken seriously, resists that assumption. It leaves open the much less comfortable possibility that some renunciates look the way they look not because they've transcended the need for society's care, but because society withdrew it first, and the two conditions are, from outside, wearing the same clothes — or, in Śuka's case, wearing none.
Two contemporary Śaiva teaching recordings take the Avadhūta of the Yadu dialogue and do two things this page's Purāṇic sources do not.5
They name him. He is identified — once, in passing — as Dattātreya, and elsewhere in the same corpus Dattātreya is placed as Ādi Bhairava, the formless taking form before Śiva took the name.5 ⚑ So the anonymous naked wanderer, whose whole power in the dialogue is that he could be anyone, acquires a lineage position at the top of one.
And they add a teacher. After the twenty-four are listed and the king has declared you did not have any guru as the highest compliment available, the Avadhūta contradicts him inside twenty seconds:
"even after learning all these things, I was not free."5
The correction is not therefore you need a proper guru after all. It is a twenty-fifth — resolved in the king's own terms as "one guru, not the 24 … and that guru was not outside but within himself."5
⚑ That cuts directly across this page's central move. The two-descriptions reading works because the Avadhūta is complete — realized being or outcast, depending on who is looking, but not a man still short of something. Here he is short of something, says so himself, and the shortfall is the point of the whole episode.
⚠️ And the naming costs the figure its function. An unnamed wanderer is a test of the observer; the whole force of the double description is that you cannot tell from outside. A wanderer identified as the Ādi Bhairava is not a test of anything — the answer is supplied with the question.
🚩 NO LOCATOR for either the naming or the twenty-fifth. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE for each. [PARAPHRASED] — auto-generated captions. Recorded as a living reading, not as evidence about the Purāṇic text above.
With The Threshold Concept: Liminal Space. That page describes the strange treatment liminal figures receive — neither one category nor another, and therefore read inconsistently by the people around them, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with suspicion, depending on which frame the observer reaches for first. Śuka is a clean instance of exactly that inconsistency, and the Bhāgavata's own translator's note makes the double reading explicit rather than leaving it implicit in the reader's varying reactions. What the pairing adds: liminal-space theory generally treats the ambiguous reading as a temporary condition of the transition itself, resolving once the person settles into their new status. Śuka's case suggests some liminal positions don't resolve — they're the permanent address, and the text's refusal to disambiguate the word across ninety subsequent chapters (he is never, at any later point, definitively re-categorized) argues that certain kinds of realized figures are meant to remain permanently unreadable by exactly this test, not as a stage but as the destination.
Sharpest implication. A tradition that produces its most authoritative teacher through a word that also means "outcast" has built something uncomfortable into its own foundation: the possibility that transcendence and social abandonment can be indistinguishable from the outside, and that the text does not consider this a problem worth solving. It reports the ambiguity and moves on to what he says.
Generative questions.