BG 18.47 — Mokṣa-Sannyāsa-Yoga

Bhagavad Gītā 18.47Chapter 18 · Mokṣa-Sannyāsa-Yoga · Krishna → Arjuna · Tāta · anuṣṭubh

श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुणः परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात् ।

स्वभावनियतं कर्म कुर्वन् नाप्नोति किल्बिषम् ॥

śreyānsvadharmo viguṇaḥ paradharmāt svanuṣṭhitāt

svabhāvaniyataṃ karma kurvannāpnoti kilbiṣam

spokensingle-voice recital; rendered via IndicF5 conditioned on a Sanskrit reference clip

meaning

Your own duty, even imperfectly done, is better than another's duty done well. Acting within the nature you were born to, you take on no sin.

ekras · bhāṣya

Shreyaan — better — svadharmah vigunah — own-duty deficient — para-dharmaat svanushthitaat — than another's-duty well-performed. Svabhaava-niyatam karma kurvan — performing nature-fixed action. Na apnoti kilbisham — does not incur sin.

Krishna delivers a famous principle: deficient sva-dharma beats well-executed para-dharma. The chapter's positional-ethics is structural, not relativist.

Shankara grounds this in the analogy of a poisonous worm: the same venom that harms others is the worm's natural element and causes it no sin. Svabhaava-niyatam karma — action determined by one's own nature — is the bhakta's rightful field. Performing within it produces no kilbisha, even when the act itself involves elements that would be sin elsewhere. The chapter is being severe about which dharma applies to which agent.

Madhusudana introduces a decisive framing absent in Shankara: sva-dharma is bhagavat-prasada-hetu — the very cause of Bhagavan's grace. This is the synthesis: karma performed as sva-dharma is simultaneously Advaita preparation — nishkama-bhava — and bhakti — prasada-reception. Even deficiently performed, it surpasses para-dharma perfectly done because the grace-channel is intact in sva-dharma and absent in para-dharma. The chapter's seemingly conservative dictum is metaphysically anchored.

Ramanuja reads the sva-dharma praised here as karma-yoga recast as mat-aradhana — service offered as worship of Bhagavan, with kartritva relinquished. For a soul embedded in prakriti — prakriti-samsrishta-purusha — karma-yoga is the connatural path: indriya-vyapara is structurally easy, hence svabhavata-eva-niyata. Jnana-yoga, by contrast, demands a difficulty that does not match the prakriti-bound jiva's actual condition. Sva-dharma is the right-fitted path.

Madhva reads svadharma imperfectly performed as exceeding para-dharma well performed. Performing svabhaava-niyatam karma, one does not incur kilbisham. In dvaita, svabhaava is not autonomous self-determination — it is the guna-mix Hari has assigned. The bhakta-jiva acting within his Hari-given station is acting in correct alignment with Hari's structural ordering; departing from station is structural inversion that produces real kilbisha.

Vallabha reads the verse as direct instruction to Arjuna: svabhaava — the specific mode of each varna — is Bhagavan's lila-prasada distributed as constitutive function. The kshatriya's sva-dharma is yuddha; executing it even imperfectly is preferable to the brahmin's bhiksha-atana however well-performed, because the kshatriya's prasada-channel is yuddha. Pushti-marga: the bhakta's varna-station is Krishna's lila-position; deviating to another's station severs the prasada-flow.

Shridhara reads the verse as the payoff of the sva-karman qualifier preceding it. He explicitly counters: bhiksha-atana — brahmin's begging-for-alms — is not superior to yuddha — Arjuna's sva-dharma — merely because battle involves slaying kinsmen. Against this, Shridhara applies svabhaava-niyatam: the kshatriya's path through battle is structurally correct for his constitution, and produces no kilbisha when performed within sva-dharma's frame.

Context

where

Chapter 18 · Mokṣa-Sannyāsa-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Krishna → Arjuna · vocative Tāta

preceded by — BG 18.46

From the one source from whom all beings arise and by whom all this is pervaded, a person attains fulfillment by worshipping that source through their own proper work.

What's going on

Your own duty, even imperfectly done, is better than another's duty done well. Acting within the nature you were born to, you take on no sin.

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

When you find yourself doing someone else's job better than your own, Shankara's venom-worm test applies: the excellence you exhibit in para-dharma is toxic to your own constitution. Identify one responsibility that is structurally yours by nature — not by title — and perform it today without comparing its output to the polished work of someone whose svabhava it actually is.

Dvaita

Madhva's cosmos is ordered by Hari's specific assignment to each svarupa — this maps onto the modern recognition that teams function when each member operates within their irreducible competence domain. Identify one area where you are performing out of role not from necessity but from reluctance to trust Hari's (or the system's) assignment; return to your station today as an act of obedience, not resignation.

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Bhakti

Sridhara's move is to pre-empt the rationalization: 'my para-dharma feels holier because it avoids the messiness of my sva-dharma.' The test is whether the messiness you are avoiding (Arjuna's: slaying kinsmen) is actually constituted by your svabhava or is an externally-imposed distortion. Name one 'messy' task that is genuinely yours by nature and that you have been outsourcing or avoiding behind the language of nonviolence or sensitivity.

Advaita-Bhakti

Madhusudana's 'bhagavat-prasada-hetu' reframe: your constitutive work is not the obstacle to grace — it is the mechanism of grace. Choose one recurring task you perform competently but joylessly, and practice it once today as if it were a grace-channel rather than an obligation. Notice whether the quality of attention changes when prasada-reception, not outcome-production, is the frame.

Adhiṣṭhāna · substrate signature

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parserByT5-Sanskrit-multitask (Nehrdich/Hellwig/Keutzer EMNLP 2024)

mūlaGRETIL e-text of the Bhagavadgītā with Śaṅkara's commentary (data entry: Gaudiya Grantha Mandira) for chapters 1-17; sanskritdocuments.org sd_bgnew.itx for chapter 18; ingested via a local Ambuda TEI build; per-verse repairs logged in post_generation_repairs

show all metadata

weightsa=1 · b=0.01 · e_v=0.005 · z=0.2 · h=0 · th=0.01

anchorfit on Ramsukhdas's Sādhak Sañjīvanī (1980), frozen across the eight-commentator panel; cross-validated R@4 = 71.6% on Śaṅkara

extracted2026-04-21

methodPaper 1, Section II.B

↓ view raw per-verse object (JSON)↗ per-verse-object schema ↗ substrate code (MIT) + data (CC-BY 4.0)

The schema generalizes to any bounded-polysemy corpus with discrete primary text units, attested witness traditions, identifiable schools, and formal substrate. Port the per-verse object; refit weights on a domain-appropriate Layer-3 anchor; ship.

Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 18, Verse 47: Krishna to Arjuna — Mokṣa-Sannyāsa-Yoga