Give up the fruit, and the same work that once bound you sets you free.
This is the promise made good on: not a new instruction, but the mechanism by which the even mind of the verses before finally pays out as freedom from birth itself.
The wise, joined to an even mind, let go of the fruit their actions bear. Freed in this way from the bondage of being born again, they arrive at the state beyond every affliction.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Krishna has spent several verses now describing the even mind that stands above the ordinary chase for results. Here he finally shows what that evenness accomplishes: not merely a calmer way of working, but freedom itself, the end of the whole cycle that begins again each time a new body is won.
The teaching
Work, ordinarily, ties you to what it produces. Join that same work to an even, discerning mind, and something shifts: it stops chaining you and becomes instead the road that carries you past the chain altogether. Giving up the fruit does not mean refusing to act, and it does not mean pretending that no result will ever come. It means loosening the craving, the longing, the quiet sense that the result belongs to you, while the doing itself continues exactly as before. And what is the fruit being released? Nothing abstract: it is the winning of a body, one you would welcome or one you would not. To win any body at all is to be born again. So when the craving for fruit is released, the very engine that drives rebirth loses its fuel. What is reached instead is named as a state free of every affliction, free of disease in the deepest sense, and this freedom, the verse implies, need not wait for some future life. It can be entered here, in the midst of ordinary action, by the one who has learned to act without needing the outcome to be theirs.
The doubt that rises
Does desireless action carry you all the way to freedom by itself? Or does it only prepare the ground for a further knowing, or ripen instead into an act of worship offered to someone beyond yourself? The verse tells you what the wise do and where they arrive. It does not fully settle how the one connects to the other.
Where the paths divide
Read as the road that runs through self-knowledge.
What finally frees you is not the action itself but the knowing it opens onto. Act with an even mind, without desire for the fruit, and your inner being grows pure. Out of that purity rises the discernment of the Self disclosed by the great teaching, that thou art. That knowledge alone, by burning away ignorance and everything ignorance produces, brings liberation. Evenness of mind, taken by itself, cannot erase the weight of what you have done; only knowledge can do that. And the state you reach this way is not a foreign country entered from outside. It is your own self, recognized without difference, whose nature was always bliss, beyond every fear.
Read as a confirmation of what the Upanishads already teach.
This needs no elaborate defense. The wise, joined with the discipline of understanding, perform their action while surrendering the fruit it bears. By that very surrender, not through some additional and separate step, they are freed from the bondage of birth. The doing is not diminished; only its relation to the result changes, from something claimed to something given. What the whole Upanishadic tradition has always taught, this verse simply confirms.
Read as a strict, dependent order of means.
Take the steps in their given order, and do not skip ahead. The fruit is given up by offering it, without desire, to the Lord. That offering, that disciplined action, becomes the means to knowledge. And knowledge, not action on its own, is what finally carries you to release. Action never frees you directly; its entire worth lies in making you fit to receive the knowledge that alone unbinds. What is renounced here, strictly, is the desire for a fruit not yet even in hand, offered ahead of time into the Lord's keeping.
Read as one intelligence leaving a lesser one behind.
Through the yoga of the inner intelligence, buddhi-yoga, a lower kind of action, one bound to a tainted reward and hollow within, is set far behind. What frees is not action as such but the very intelligence that rightly practiced action can open onto. Take refuge there. The disease-free state named at the end of the verse is not territory to be won from outside; it is the contraction dissolving that made ordinary striving feel diseased in the first place.
Read as worship carrying you into Vishnu's own dwelling.
Give the whole verse its plainly devotional color. The wise abandon the fruit of action and perform it solely as worship offered to the Lord. That single reorientation, from acting for yourself to acting for Him, frees you from the bondage that takes the shape of birth. And the disease-free state you reach is not left vague: it is the abode of Vishnu, called liberation, an eternal dwelling of bliss where no affliction can enter. Self-knowledge is not set aside here; it becomes, in its turn, the very cause of reaching that abode.
Read as a discipline anyone, whatever their metaphysics, can practice today.
Set the schools' disagreements to one side for a moment and notice what they all assume: that releasing craving toward an outcome is something within your power, right now, regardless of whether you can articulate what ultimately follows from it. The plural, the wise, is doing real work here. It is not naming a rare class of adepts but describing anyone who has settled, even briefly, into an even mind and let a result go. That, and not a resolved metaphysics, is the practice on offer.
All six readings agree that releasing craving for the fruit is what changes everything. They part on what that release actually does: does it directly untie the knot of birth, as Ramanuja reads it, or does it only prepare a mind that some further knowledge, or some further act of worship, must complete? This page will not adjudicate between them. It leaves the disagreement exactly where the verse itself leaves it.
A question to carry
The next time you catch yourself hoping hard for a particular outcome, can you notice the hoping itself, without acting on it, and see what remains of the work in front of you once the hoping has quietly loosened its grip?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
So do the work in front of you, hold it with your whole attention, and let whatever it produces go where it will, unclaimed, while you walk on toward the state beyond every affliction.
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 closes his teaching on buddhi-yoga here, showing exactly how the even mind he has been describing ripens into the freedom he named a chapter's worth of duty ago.
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.
Evenness of mind is what changes action from a chain into a road; the deed itself need not change at all.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 3 others’ words
The verse answers the question the previous lines left open: how can action, which ordinarily chains a person to its results, ever become a road to freedom? The answer given here is that it depends entirely on the inner stance, buddhi-yukta, being joined to the even, discerning mind. Action from that stance stops binding and begins to liberate.
Releasing the fruit means releasing craving and ownership, not refusing to act or denying that results come.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Madhva · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 3 others’ words
Abandoning the fruit does not mean refusing to act, and it does not mean pretending results will not come. It means releasing the craving, the longing, and the sense of ownership toward whatever the action yields, and this releasing is something every one of the wise, without exception, is shown capable of doing.
The fruit renounced is a new body, wanted or unwanted; winning any body at all is being born again.
Across Advaita, Dvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Madhva · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Madhva, and 2 others’ words
The fruit renounced is identified precisely: it is the gaining of a body, pleasant or unpleasant, desired or undesired. To win any body at all is to be born again, so releasing the craving for fruit is releasing the very cause of rebirth, and this is why freedom from birth follows the giving up of fruit as directly as it does in the verse's own phrasing.
The state reached is free of every affliction, and it can be entered even now, while you still live.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
The goal reached, padam anamayam, is named as a state entirely free of disease, disturbance, or affliction. Every commentator treats this as liberation itself, however each then goes on to characterize the texture of that liberated state, whether as one's own true nature disclosed or as the Lord's own dwelling place.
Having shown this in the wise, the teaching turns and asks the same of whoever is listening.
Across Bhakti, Advaita, Kashmir ŚaivaŚrīdhara · Madhusūdana · AbhinavaguptaIn Śrīdhara, Madhusūdana, and 1 others’ words
The verse is read as an exhortation as much as a description. Having shown what the wise do and where they arrive, the teaching turns and presses outward: the listener too, as a seeker of the highest good, is being asked to take up exactly this same practice of acting without craving for its fruit.
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 treats the verse as a plain confirmation of an already well-established teaching, needing no elaborate defense. The wise, joined with the discipline of understanding, perform action while surrendering its fruit, and by that very surrender, without a further separate step, they are freed from the bondage of birth. This is simply what the Upanishads have always taught, now spoken in Krishna's own voice.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
Madhva reads a strict order of dependent means: the fruit is given up by offering it, without desire, to the Lord Hari; that offering is the means to knowledge; and knowledge alone, not action by itself, is the means to release. Action never frees directly. Its whole worth lies in making the mind fit to receive the knowledge that finally unbinds, and this ordering must not be collapsed into a single leap.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Sridhara gives the whole verse a clearly Vaishnava color: the wise abandon fruit and act solely as worship of the Lord, and the disease-free state they reach is named directly as the abode of Vishnu, called liberation, the eternal dwelling of bliss where nothing can ail. Self-knowledge here is not the final word but the cause of reaching that abode, and the closing address falls on the listener to take up this very worship.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Read together, Madhusudana's answer to the standing objection, that releasing even good fruit outweighs any fruit kept, and Shankara's insistence that evenness of mind alone cannot erase deeds, converge on a practical, universally accessible teaching: the plural, the wise, signals that anyone settled in evenness, whatever their capacity for subtle metaphysics, can release craving and thereby remove the cause of their own rebirth.
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
Notice, in whatever you are doing right now, the faint pull toward how it will turn out. Do not fight that pull; simply see it, and let your attention settle back onto the doing itself, held with an even mind. This small, repeatable return is the entire practice this verse describes: not a single dramatic renunciation, but a mind that keeps coming back to evenness, task after task, until the coming back needs no more effort.
So let the fruit of what you do this day return to wherever it belongs, and walk on, unburdened, toward the state beyond all ill.
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 answers the question the previous lines left open: how can action, which ordinarily chains a person to its results, ever become a road to freedom? The answer given here is that it depends entirely on the inner stance, buddhi-yukta, being joined to the even, discerning mind. Action from that stance stops binding and begins to liberate.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Abandoning the fruit does not mean refusing to act, and it does not mean pretending results will not come. It means releasing the craving, the longing, and the sense of ownership toward whatever the action yields, and this releasing is something every one of the wise, without exception, is shown capable of doing.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The fruit renounced is identified precisely: it is the gaining of a body, pleasant or unpleasant, desired or undesired. To win any body at all is to be born again, so releasing the craving for fruit is releasing the very cause of rebirth, and this is why freedom from birth follows the giving up of fruit as directly as it does in the verse's own phrasing.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhvācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The goal reached, padam anamayam, is named as a state entirely free of disease, disturbance, or affliction. Every commentator treats this as liberation itself, however each then goes on to characterize the texture of that liberated state, whether as one's own true nature disclosed or as the Lord's own dwelling place.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The verse is read as an exhortation as much as a description. Having shown what the wise do and where they arrive, the teaching turns and presses outward: the listener too, as a seeker of the highest good, is being asked to take up exactly this same practice of acting without craving for its fruit.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Shankara and Madhusudana trace a precise causal chain: desireless action purifies the inner being; that purity gives rise to the discernment of the Self disclosed by the great sentence that thou art; and that knowledge alone, by destroying ignorance and its effects, brings liberation. Evenness of mind cannot by itself erase the weight of good and bad deeds, so what finally frees is knowledge, for which desireless action is only the necessary preparation. The state reached is not a separate place but one's own self recognized without difference, Brahman, of the nature of bliss.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Ramanuja treats the verse as a plain confirmation of an already well-established teaching, needing no elaborate defense. The wise, joined with the discipline of understanding, perform action while surrendering its fruit, and by that very surrender, without a further separate step, they are freed from the bondage of birth. This is simply what the Upanishads have always taught, now spoken in Krishna's own voice.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
Madhva reads a strict order of dependent means: the fruit is given up by offering it, without desire, to the Lord Hari; that offering is the means to knowledge; and knowledge alone, not action by itself, is the means to release. Action never frees directly. Its whole worth lies in making the mind fit to receive the knowledge that finally unbinds, and this ordering must not be collapsed into a single leap.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
Abhinavagupta reads the verse through the buddhi-yoga just introduced: through the yoga of the inner intelligence, the lower, tainted kind of action, bound to reward and hollow within, is left far behind. What frees is not action as such but the very intelligence that rightly practiced action opens onto, so the invitation is to take refuge in that freeing intelligence itself.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Sridhara gives the whole verse a clearly Vaishnava color: the wise abandon fruit and act solely as worship of the Lord, and the disease-free state they reach is named directly as the abode of Vishnu, called liberation, the eternal dwelling of bliss where nothing can ail. Self-knowledge here is not the final word but the cause of reaching that abode, and the closing address falls on the listener to take up this very worship.
Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
Read together, Madhusudana's answer to the standing objection, that releasing even good fruit outweighs any fruit kept, and Shankara's insistence that evenness of mind alone cannot erase deeds, converge on a practical, universally accessible teaching: the plural, the wise, signals that anyone settled in evenness, whatever their capacity for subtle metaphysics, can release craving and thereby remove the cause of their own rebirth.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śaṅkarācārya
A Seeker Asks
If giving up the fruit finally frees me, why does it matter whether I understand this as knowledge, as worship, or simply as evenness of mind? Isn't the practice the same either way?
The practice looks the same at the start: release the craving, keep doing the work. But the schools differ on what that practice is finally for. Shankara and Madhva place it in service of a further knowledge; without knowledge, on their reading, the practice purifies but does not by itself release you.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhvācārya
Ramanuja and Sridhara hold that the practice, rightly done as surrender or worship, is already the direct cause of your freedom, with nothing further required. For them the same act you are already performing is not merely preparatory; it is doing the whole work, right now.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
You do not need to resolve this dispute before you begin. Every reading agrees on the next concrete step: let the craving for a particular outcome go, and act with an even mind. Whether that step is preparation or already the path, it is the same step, and it is the one available to you today.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Contemplation
Notice, in whatever you are doing right now, the faint pull toward how it will turn out. Do not fight that pull; simply see it, and let your attention settle back onto the doing itself, held with an even mind. This small, repeatable return is the entire practice this verse describes: not a single dramatic renunciation, but a mind that keeps coming back to evenness, task after task, until the coming back needs no more effort.
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.