BG 3.20 — Karma-Yoga — Sūtrakṛt-Gītā

Bhagavad Gītā 3.20Chapter 3 · Karma-Yoga · Krishna → Arjuna · anuṣṭubh

कर्मणैव हि संसिद्धिमास्थिता जनकादयः ।

लोकसंग्रहमेवापि संपश्यन् कर्तुमर्हसि ॥

karmaṇaiva hi saṃsiddhim āsthitā janakādayaḥ

loka-saṃgraham evāpi saṃpaśyan kartum arhasi

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

meaning

Janaka and the royal sages reached their highest through action alone; seeing how the world holds together, you too should act.

ekras · bhāṣya

Two reasons given, each independently sufficient. First, the precedent: King Janaka, the famous rishi-king of Mithila, attained perfection through karma. Not through retreating to the forest. Through performing his kingly duty in the world while standing in jnana. The list of janakadayah — Janaka and the others like him — places Arjuna among kings who lived this way.

Ramanuja makes a pointed claim: even those eligible for jnana-yoga find karma-yoga superior as a means to atma-darshana. Janaka was not a partial example; he was the ideal. The path through action is not the lesser path. Second, the public reason: loka-samgraha. The holding-together of the social order.

Shridhara reads this tightly: when the wise act, the unwise follow their example; when the wise withdraw, the unwise lose the model and the order frays. The behavior of those at the front of the social ladder is not their private business; it is the pattern those behind them will copy.

Madhusudana addresses an obvious objection. Could even a jijnasu — a knowledge-seeker — renounce karma to pursue shravana-manana-nididhyasana? The answer is no. The work of holding the world together is not optional even at the threshold of full knowing; it falls away only after that knowing has fully arrived. The two reasons converge on the same instruction: act.

Context

where

Chapter 3 · Karma-Yoga · meter anuṣṭubh

who speaks

Krishna → Arjuna

preceded by — BG 3.19

Keep acting without clinging to results, and that freedom from attachment itself carries you to the highest.

What's going on

Janaka and the royal sages reached their highest through action alone; seeing how the world holds together, you too should act.

Vyavahāra · try it in your life

Advaita

A scientist who has seen through ego-construction continues publishing and teaching not from personal ambition but because prārabdha — the force of an already-launched life — and the world's need for clear thought both pull her forward. She acts while remaining inwardly unmoved, demonstrating that viveka (discernment) does not end a career but reorients it.

Dvaita

A teacher in a school governed by Haribhakti (devotion to Hari as absolute Lord) performs her pedagogical duties with full professional rigor, understanding that her students' welfare is her service to Hari and that no shortcut — neither ritual nor retreat — replaces the karma of honest daily teaching as a vehicle for jñāna.

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Viśiṣṭādvaita

A doctor who treats each patient as the Bhagavān present in a suffering body turns clinical work into kainkarya — the karma-yoga of loving service. He does not abandon medicine for private contemplation even when spiritually mature; his very competence becomes an act of devotion that draws patients and junior physicians alike toward integrous conduct.

Śuddhādvaita

A craftsperson in the Puṣṭi tradition makes each object — a pot, a garment, a meal — as an offering within Kṛṣṇa's līlā (divine play). The work is not a means to a later spiritual reward; the prasāda of skillful, loving craftsmanship is itself the ripening. There is no gap between the making and the freedom.

Bhakti

A community elder continues participating in local governance, festivals, and neighborhood mediation long after personal ambitions have quieted, knowing that if respected figures withdraw, those around them lose their orientating examples. Her presence in the market and the council hall is itself a form of loka-saṃgraha — keeping the community's dharmic compass steady.

Advaita-Bhakti

An entrepreneur who recognizes both the constitutional facts of his life — obligations to employees, family, community — and the inner jijñāsā (desire to know) that drives him does not abandon his company to pursue an ashram. Like Janaka ruling Mithilā while remaining inwardly a jñānī, he governs his organization as both a practical necessity and a site of self-refinement, holding the tension rather than resolving it by flight.

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

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 3, Verse 20: Krishna to Arjuna — Karma-Yoga