What it is

Avadhāna Chaupar is a contemplative journey across seventy-two squares, from the first breath of Janma (Birth) to the open summit of Cetanā (Pure Awareness). At each step a questioner tests your attention — a sequence to hold, a bell to count, an interruption to resist — and how well you hold it decides how far you step. Golden arrows of virtue lift you; gentle serpents of attachment draw you down, always to rest and begin again.

It makes no promise of any benefit, and asks nothing of you but a little of your time. The reward is the walking itself: the curiosity of each square’s reflection, and the unhurried pleasure of climbing toward stillness.

Built for comfort

Part of the UAIE accessibility suite, the game adapts to the reader rather than the other way round.

The tradition behind it

The board descends from Gyan Chaupar — also called Moksha Patam — the medieval Indian game of knowledge that became the snakes and ladders of every childhood. Dated to around the thirteenth century and associated with the saint Jñāneśvara and the Jain teachers of western India, it drew on the deeper Vedic and Puranic vision of karma, the virtues and vices, and the soul’s ascent through the planes toward liberation.

Avadhāna Chaupar keeps the authentic seventy-two-square Hindu count, with several squares set to their documented traditional positions and named in Sanskrit. The reflections are written anew. The one change of spirit is its heart: where the old game was governed by a die standing for blind karma, here it is your own cultivated attention that carries you upward.