BG 2.47 — Sāṅkhya-Yoga — Sūtrakṛt-Gītā

Bhagavad Gītā 2.47Chapter 2 · Sāṅkhya-Yoga · Krishna → Arjuna · anuṣṭubh

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस् ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।

मा कर्मफलहेतुर् भूर् मा ते सङ्गो ऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana

mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo 'stv akarmaṇi

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

meaning

You have the right to act, never to the fruits of action. Never let the fruit be your motive, and never let inaction be your refuge.

ekras · bhāṣya

Four phrases, two prohibitions and two affirmations balanced like a scale. The first phrase grants. You have a right — adhikara — to action. Action is your domain. The second phrase removes. Phaleshu kadachana — in fruits, never. Not when you act for them. Not even when you secretly hope. The whole field of fruit-anticipation is taken away. The third phrase goes deeper: don't even be the karma-phala-hetu — the cause of fruit through action. The hetu is the inner causal stance that connects what you do to what you expect. Removing that connection is what nishkama-karma actually means. The fourth phrase closes the back door: don't take refuge in akarma — inaction. Not doing is not the answer. Sankaracarya draws the technical distinction: your adhikara is in karma, not yet in jnana-nishtha. The karma is what is given to you because of where you stand; the question is only how to do it.

Madhusudana reads the verse as the precise prescription for one whose antahkarana is still impure: action as chitta-shuddhi, action as the purifier of the inner instrument. Inquiry into Vedanta-sentences requires a purified locus; until that purification arrives, action with right inner stance is the path.

Krishna is not asking Arjuna to be a Vedantin first. He is giving him a way to act that will become Vedantin-suitable over time. The four-phrase shloka is a complete instruction: act, don't anticipate, don't connect, don't withdraw. Most readers carry it as a summary of the entire Gita. The chapter has been building toward exactly this verse since 2.31.

Context

where

Chapter 2 · Sāṅkhya-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Krishna → Arjuna

preceded by — BG 2.46

When a flood stretches in every direction, a single well adds nothing new; all the Vedas offer nothing beyond what the one who truly knows already holds.

What's going on

You have the right to act, never to the fruits of action. Never let the fruit be your motive, and never let inaction be your refuge.

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

Before beginning any significant task — a presentation, a difficult conversation, a financial decision — pause to notice whether the mind is already rehearsing the fruit (the praise, the income, the vindication). Śaṅkara's point is not that you should not plan outcomes but that craving for a specific result at this moment converts your action into a bondage-generator. Do the work as fully as possible; then, at the moment you release it into the world, practice a deliberate decoupling: the outcome belongs to conditions you do not control, and your identity is not a function of what returns.

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Rāmānuja's frame transforms ordinary professional work into kainkarya — service to the Lord who pervades the workplace, the colleague, the institution. This is not metaphorical: it is a re-description of agency. When the result-craving arises, the Viśiṣṭādvaita practitioner does not suppress it but re-routes it — asking 'whose work is this really?' and answering with the understanding that the Lord is both the field-in-which-one-acts and the actual recipient of the action's value. The discipline is to hold this re-framing consistently so that outcome-anxiety loses its grip not through stoic suppression but through transferred ownership.

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Dvaita

Madhva's practical instruction is grounded in a clear ontological proposition: you are not the independent cause of anything. Applied to everyday work, this means that when a project succeeds or fails, the Dvaita-informed practitioner traces causality honestly — to the network of conditions, the will of others, and ultimately to Hari's sovereignty — rather than building a narrative of personal triumph or defeat. This is not fatalism but an accurate accounting: continue the action fully (prātyavāya, the consequence of omission, is real), but refuse the story that makes the jīva the master-variable.

Śuddhādvaita

Vallabha's verse is structurally about what is upādēya — what is worth receiving from life. The Puṣṭi-mārga answer is: action itself, as prasāda from Kṛṣṇa, is the gift. In everyday terms this means treating each task as something Kṛṣṇa has already given you to do, not as something you are generating toward a future payoff. The rapturous quality of this school's voice carries a practical instruction: bring full, even joyful engagement to the action, while remaining utterly indifferent to whether the world registers it — because the registration that matters is the one at the source, not the one at the receiving end.

Bhakti

Śrīdhara's technical distinction between kāmita (consciously desired) and akāmita (unclaimed) fruit has a precise everyday use: when working toward a goal, track whether you have converted the outcome into a willed personal possession in your inner narration. Salary earned through agreed work is not 'fruit-craving' in the bondage-producing sense; the anxious mental act of rehearsing the salary while performing the work is. The practice is to execute the action's full technical quality — do the work as well as it can be done — without simultaneously running the internal audit of 'and here is what I will claim from this.'

Advaita-Bhakti

Madhusūdana's composite position offers the most diagnostically useful everyday frame: ask first whether your inner instrument is currently fit for contemplation. If the mind is agitated, restless, or desire-saturated, the direct path of Vedāntic inquiry will not work — and the disciplined response is to engage action precisely as the purification method, not to escape into pseudo-renunciation. Offering the action to Bhagavān (bhagavad-arpaṇa-buddhi) is the specific practice that neutralizes the fruit-generating mechanism: it is not a pious gesture but a structural operation that changes what the action does to the actor.

Adhiṣṭhāna · substrate signature

substratev2.6-frozen

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

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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 2, Verse 47: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga