Your claim ends at the doing; the fruit was never in your keeping.
It is easy to hear this line as permission to stop caring about outcomes. It asks something more exact: put your whole care into the deed, and let the yield go where it will.
You have a claim on the doing, never on what it yields. Do not act in order to obtain the fruit, and do not decide that since the fruit is not yours, you may as well stop acting.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Krishna has just told Arjuna of a Self that no weapon reaches and no death ends. Now he sets that aside for a moment and turns to something nearer at hand: the work in front of you, today, on this field. This is the first working instruction he gives, the seed of everything he will call karma-yoga.
The teaching
Your entitlement reaches exactly as far as the action and no further. You may do the deed; you may not command what it brings back to you. This is not a promise that results will fail to arrive, only an instruction about where your grasping is permitted to land. Do not let the hoped-for fruit be the reason you lift your hand to act; let the rightness of the act itself be reason enough. And do not swing to the opposite error: hearing that the fruit is not yours, do not conclude that the work itself may be set down. Withdrawal is not the same as freedom from craving; sometimes it is only craving wearing a different coat, the craving for ease, for being spared the labor and its risk. The same deed, done for the sake of its reward, returns you again and again to more craving. Done without that motive, it becomes the very thing that clears the mind enough to see clearly.
The doubt that rises
Where exactly does this leave the self who acts? Is desireless action only a discipline that readies the mind for a separate, later knowing? Or can the offered deed itself be the whole of the path? And when both the doing and its fruit are handed elsewhere, what, if anything, is left of the one who does?
Where the paths divide
Read as a question of present fitness.
The entitlement named here belongs to a mind not yet steady enough to rest in knowledge directly. Action is given as the discipline that purifies that mind, indirectly, so that knowledge can later dawn on its own. Knowledge alone frees; action prepares the ground it stands on. Read this way, the verse is not the destination. It is the path that clears the approach to it.
Read as worship that surrenders both the deed and the doer.
Here desireless action is not merely preparatory. Offered as worship, with the sense of agency itself handed to the Lord along with the fruit, the deed is already the direct cause of liberation. Nothing is deferred to a later, separate knowledge; the offering does the whole work, because it is no longer performed by a self claiming to be its author.
Read as a lesson in dependence, from the very right to act.
Even the entitlement spoken of here is not an independent possession. It is delegated, sustained moment to moment by a will beyond your own, and the fruit that follows is fixed entirely by that same will, according to what your own nature can rightly receive. To crave the fruit as though it were yours to award yourself mistakes your very standing in the world.
Read as the self's own freedom recognized, not a rule received.
The entitlement here is not a permission granted from outside. It is a recognition of what you already are: a free, self-expressing awareness, and every action is simply that freedom taking shape. Craving contracts this freedom into a narrow, anxious self measuring gain and loss. To act without craving is not to suppress your nature but to stop forgetting it.
Read as a caution against mistaking withdrawal for release.
Notice that duty is spoken before entitlement, and the warning against craving the fruit comes only after. Duty was never the question; only where the heart rests was ever in doubt. And notice, too, that fleeing into inaction is its own hidden craving, a wish for ease dressed up as renunciation. What is asked instead is action with no prize sought at all, not reward, and not the comfort of not acting.
Read as an operation on motive, never on the deed.
What this verse removes is a single link: the chain running from desire to the deed it drives. The deed itself is never the target and is never asked to stop. This is, if anything, a harder discipline than acting from desire, since it must be sustained by the bare rightness of the work with none of the usual fuel of anticipated reward.
All six readings agree that your claim stops at the doing. They part on what follows from that. Is desireless action a preparation for a separate knowing, or is it already, itself, the whole path? Is the doer one more thing that must be surrendered along with the fruit, or does something of the doer remain, quietly offering the work to what is greater than itself? The verse does not settle this, and neither will this page.
A question to carry
When you finally stop reaching for what your work will bring you, what is it that keeps working, and what, if anything, is left of the one who used to call it 'mine'?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
So take up the task in front of you. Give it your whole attention. And let its fruit rest exactly where it has always belonged, beyond your reach and beyond your need to hold it.
Each school is voiced from the commentators named above. Their full words, every translation, and where the schools agree and differ wait in the reading desk just below. Open the commentary desk.
Krishna has just named the Self that death cannot touch; here he turns to the work of living itself, and gives the first working instruction of karma-yoga.
Where they agreethe convergence
Across schools and centuries the commentators come to the same ground. These are the points they share, and the voices that hold each one.
The doing is yours; its yield never was, and this holds at every moment of the act, not only at its end.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
The verse draws one firm line: you have a claim on the action, and no claim, at any time, on its fruit. This is not a claim about outcomes never arriving; it is a claim about where your grasping is allowed to land. The doing is yours. What the doing yields belongs to a wider order you do not govern.
Do not let the hoped-for fruit be the reason you begin; let the deed itself be reason enough.
Across Advaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Madhusūdana · ŚrīdharaIn Śaṅkara, Madhusūdana, and 1 others’ words
The word for never, kadacana, is read as total: not before the act, not during it, not after, and not even at the beginner's stage when a little hope for the result might feel harmless. The prohibition covers the whole span of the doing, without exception.
Do not mistake withdrawal for freedom: refusing the work out of fear of its fruit is only another kind of grasping.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, DvaitaŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
The middle line, warning against becoming the cause of the fruit, is read practically: do not let the fruit be the engine that starts the deed. Whatever the exact grammar, the commentators converge on this same instruction, act, but not because of what acting will bring you.
The very same deed becomes a bond or a doorway, and the difference is never the deed but the hand that holds it.
Across Advaita, Kashmir Śaiva, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Abhinavagupta, and 2 others’ words
The closing line guards the opposite failure. Having heard that the fruit is not yours, a person might conclude that action itself may be dropped. The verse forbids this too, naming attachment to inaction as its own, subtler form of clinging, not a way out of clinging at all.
Underneath the four directives lies one mechanism: the very same deed either binds or frees depending only on the inner stance carried toward its fruit.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, DvaitaŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
Craving turns action into the wheel that returns you to more action; the absence of craving turns the identical action into what purifies and, eventually, liberates.
This is the shared ground; it can be carried as it is. Below is where they differ.
Where they differthe divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita, in their fuller words
Ramanuja gives desireless action a higher status than mere preparation: performed as worship of the Lord, and with both agency and fruit referred back to Him, such action is itself the direct cause of liberation, not merely its purifying preface. The doership is disowned along with the fruit.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
Madhva reads the whole verse against the backdrop of radical dependence: the self has only a delegated competence to act, granted and sustained by the Lord's will, and the fruit is fixed entirely by that same will according to the self's own nature and fitness. Giving up craving for fruit is the correct posture of a dependent being; attachment to inaction is a refusal of that very dependence.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Sridhara reads the verse's own word order as doctrinally deliberate: duty is named before entitlement, and the prohibition on fruit only follows. He declines to force a choice between knowledge and devotion, since a mind purified by desireless action is the common soil both grow from; the wish to escape into inaction is itself a subtle fruit-desire, the desire for ease.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Read against the traditional grammar of adhikara as bounded competence, a modern-facing gloss stresses the verse as furnishing the technical definition on which all subsequent karma-yoga instruction depends: the cessation of the fruit as motive, an operation performed on desire, never on the deed, demanding in fact a harder discipline than ordinary desire-driven action.
A few questions to carry
These ask for understanding, not recall; each answer is settled by the commentary itself.
For a second sitting
Carry this with youwhat stays
Try holding the verse this way while you work: keep your full attention on the doing, and each time your mind reaches ahead to how it will turn out, notice the reaching and let it fall back to the task in front of you. This is not indifference to outcomes. It is a redirection of where your effort actually goes, off the result you cannot govern and onto the deed you can.
So take up the work in front of you, hold it with your whole attention, and let its fruit rest where it has always belonged.
Read deeper
Everything a full study holds, folded below.
Word by word
All the commentary, woven together
The commentary, woven together
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
he verse draws one firm line: you have a claim on the action, and no claim, at any time, on its fruit. This is not a claim about outcomes never arriving; it is a claim about where your grasping is allowed to land. The doing is yours. What the doing yields belongs to a wider order you do not govern.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
The word for never, kadacana, is read as total: not before the act, not during it, not after, and not even at the beginner's stage when a little hope for the result might feel harmless. The prohibition covers the whole span of the doing, without exception.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī
The middle line, warning against becoming the cause of the fruit, is read practically: do not let the fruit be the engine that starts the deed. Whatever the exact grammar, the commentators converge on this same instruction, act, but not because of what acting will bring you.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The closing line guards the opposite failure. Having heard that the fruit is not yours, a person might conclude that action itself may be dropped. The verse forbids this too, naming attachment to inaction as its own, subtler form of clinging, not a way out of clinging at all.
Śaṅkarācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Underneath the four directives lies one mechanism: the very same deed either binds or frees depending only on the inner stance carried toward its fruit. Craving turns action into the wheel that returns you to more action; the absence of craving turns the identical action into what purifies and, eventually, liberates.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Read as a statement of fitness: the person addressed here is not yet steady enough for the direct path of knowledge, so action is assigned as the purifier that prepares the mind for it. Action is preparatory and indirect; knowledge alone liberates directly. Madhusudana sharpens this into a technical claim: what is actually removed is the fruit's status as motive, not action, and this severing perfected into habit is the very skill in action named three verses later.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Ramanuja gives desireless action a higher status than mere preparation: performed as worship of the Lord, and with both agency and fruit referred back to Him, such action is itself the direct cause of liberation, not merely its purifying preface. The doership is disowned along with the fruit.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
Madhva reads the whole verse against the backdrop of radical dependence: the self has only a delegated competence to act, granted and sustained by the Lord's will, and the fruit is fixed entirely by that same will according to the self's own nature and fitness. Giving up craving for fruit is the correct posture of a dependent being; attachment to inaction is a refusal of that very dependence.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
Abhinavagupta recasts entitlement as a recognition of the self's own freedom, consciousness's innate nature, rather than a rule from outside. Fruit-craving is the contraction of that freedom into a narrow, anxious identity; the closing line follows naturally, since action is nothing but the self's own dynamism and to recoil from it mistakes stillness for freedom.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Sridhara reads the verse's own word order as doctrinally deliberate: duty is named before entitlement, and the prohibition on fruit only follows. He declines to force a choice between knowledge and devotion, since a mind purified by desireless action is the common soil both grow from; the wish to escape into inaction is itself a subtle fruit-desire, the desire for ease.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
Read against the traditional grammar of adhikara as bounded competence, a modern-facing gloss stresses the verse as furnishing the technical definition on which all subsequent karma-yoga instruction depends: the cessation of the fruit as motive, an operation performed on desire, never on the deed, demanding in fact a harder discipline than ordinary desire-driven action.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
A Seeker Asks
If I give up all claim on the result, what keeps me acting with care, and how is that different from not caring at all?
The verse itself forecloses the conclusion you fear. In the same breath that it removes your claim on the fruit, it forbids attachment to inaction. Giving up the fruit is never license to slacken; the text closes that door in its own final line.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
What is removed is ownership of the outcome, not engagement with the task. You keep your whole claim on the doing; you release only the wish that a particular result must come to you. The care moves from the result to the deed itself.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
It is not indifference, because the outcome was never within your grasp to begin with. Clinging to it added anxiety without ever adding control. Letting it go frees the same attention to be spent entirely on doing the work well.
Madhvācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Contemplation
Try holding the verse this way while you work: keep your full attention on the doing, and each time your mind reaches ahead to how it will turn out, notice the reaching and let it fall back to the task in front of you. This is not indifference to outcomes. It is a redirection of where your effort actually goes, off the result you cannot govern and onto the deed you can.
Sit with this · sonnet-5-authored
All the translations and commentary
Pull up a chair.
You have come to sit with this verse. When you are ready to hear the translators and the commentators in full, open a tradition in the doorways below, or add a voice by name above.
Also hear this verse, tradition by tradition.