Gītā

Chapter 2 · Verse 47

spoken by Krishna
Essence

Do the work. Drop the claim on what it produces.

Krishna has been building toward the core of karma yoga. This is the verse where it crystallizes: the famous injunction that will echo through the rest of the Gita and through every serious practitioner's life.

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana | mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo 'stv akarmaṇi ||

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन । मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥
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1.Plain meaning

You have a right only to the action itself, never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let there be any attachment to inaction.

2.Line by line

karmaṇy evādhikāras te

"Your jurisdiction ends at the act itself"
The word 'adhikara' is usually translated as 'right,' but it carries a cleaner meaning: jurisdiction, scope of authority, what is actually yours to control. Your jurisdiction ends at the action. Not one inch past it. This is not a spiritual consolation prize. It is a precise description of what is actually under your control. The action sits in your hands. The outcome sits in a field of causes you did not create and cannot fully see.

mā phaleṣu kadācana

"Never in the fruits"
'Kadācana' means 'at any time' or 'ever.' This is not a soft suggestion. It is absolute: not now, not later, not even once. The fruits are in a different domain entirely. They depend on timing, on other people's choices, on conditions upstream and downstream. You are not the only agent. You were never the only agent. This does not mean you don't aim. It means you don't confuse aiming with controlling.

mā karma-phala-hetur bhūḥ

"Don't let the result be the reason you act"
This is the psychological nerve of the whole verse. 'Hetu' means cause, motive, reason. Don't let the expected result be the engine driving the action. Because when it is, everything warps. You start shading the action toward what gets rewarded, even when that's not the right move. You flinch when the outcome looks uncertain. You stop being present to what the action actually requires. It does NOT mean: act without caring about quality or consequence. It DOES mean: act because the action is what is called for, not because you've already decided what return you want from it.

mā te saṅgo 'stv akarmaṇi

"Don't slip into not-acting either"
This is the verse's guard against its own misreading. Someone hears 'don't be attached to results' and concludes: then why bother acting at all? Krishna closes that exit immediately. 'Sanga' means attachment, clinging. Don't cling to inaction as if it were the safe option. Inaction is not neutral. Inaction is also a choice, and it also produces fruits. Stepping back from the field because you're afraid of getting the result wrong is just fear dressed up as detachment.

3.What is really happening

A.The architecture of anxiety

Most human suffering around work and action comes from being outcome-attached. You are not really doing the thing; you are doing your idea of what the thing will produce. The action is partly hijacked. Krishna is naming the mechanism precisely: when the fruit becomes the motive, the present action is distorted by a future that hasn't arrived and may not.

B.The two exits Krishna closes

The verse shuts two doors at once. Door one: act, but for the fruit (outcome-addiction). Door two: don't act at all because results are uncertain (paralysis disguised as wisdom). Both exits are a way of not being fully in the action. The verse leaves only one door open: act completely, without the result as the reason.

C.This is not indifference

A common misread: detachment from results means you stop caring how well you do. That's wrong. In fact, the opposite often happens. When you are not white-knuckling the outcome, attention can rest fully on what the action actually needs. A surgeon who has made peace with uncertainty doesn't become a careless surgeon; they become steadier.

D.The witness observing the actor

The steadier interior (the part of the mind Krishna represents here) can see what Arjuna cannot: that the outcome is downstream of far more than any single actor's effort. The one who acts from that wider view isn't passive. They're simply accurate about what they own. The action is theirs. The result is the world's.

4.Modern parallel

Person A (still caught): spends half their creative energy calculating how the work will be received before the work is done. They write the email imagining how it will land. They ship the product thinking about the review scores. They are always slightly absent from what they're doing, because part of them is already managing the reaction. The work itself gets a fraction of their attention. Person B (after crossing): does the thing the thing needs. Not because results don't matter, but because they've noticed that the result takes care of itself more reliably when full attention is in the action. They can adjust after feedback arrives, because they weren't pre-loaded with an outcome they needed to defend.

Today's world · 2026

Metrics-obsessed work culture has made outcome-attachment the default setting. Every action gets a number attached to it: views, likes, conversions, revenue, performance rating. The feedback loop is so fast and so visible that people start optimizing for the metric before they've even done the work.

This verse is describing exactly what breaks down when that happens. When the fruit is the motive, the action bends toward what scores, not toward what's true or right or most useful. The product gets rounded toward what marketing can measure. The essay gets written for the algorithm.

The practical move is simple but difficult: complete the action as if the dashboard didn't exist, then look at the dashboard. The sequence matters.

→What comes next

Verse 2.48 introduces the term 'yoga' explicitly for the first time in this context: acting with an even mind, not swayed by success or failure. Krishna begins to define what doing this without outcome-attachment actually looks like in the body and mind. When ready, say: "2.48"