Chapter 5 · Verse 15

spoken by Krishna

Essence

The unchanging core of you neither owns your mistakes nor your merits; confusion about what you are is what makes it seem otherwise.

Krishna has been explaining what it means to act without ownership. Here he pushes deeper: not only does the wise person not claim actions, but the very self at the center does not take on the stain of anyone's actions, good or bad. The next question is obvious: then why do people live as if it does?

nādatte kasyacit pāpaṃ na caiva sukṛtaṃ vibhuḥ | ajñānenāvṛtaṃ jñānaṃ tena muhyanti jantavaḥ ||

नादत्ते कस्यचित्पापं न चैव सुकृतं विभुः । अज्ञानेनावृतं ज्ञानं तेन मुह्यन्ति जन्तवः ॥

1.Plain meaning

The all-pervading one (vibhu) does not take on anyone's sin, nor anyone's merit either. Knowledge is covered by ignorance, and because of that, living beings are confused and deluded.

2.Line by line

nādatte kasyacit pāpaṃ

"Does not absorb anyone's wrong"

The word 'adatte' comes from the root 'da' with the prefix 'ā', meaning to take up, to receive, to absorb. 'Na adatte' means: does not take it in. Does not accept the deposit. This is not a moral claim about divine forgiveness. It is a structural claim about how the witnessing awareness at the center of experience actually works. It does not accumulate negativity the way a sponge accumulates water. Your deepest self is not a ledger. Notice the word 'kasyacit': of anyone, of any person whatsoever. The scope is total. No exception. No person's wrong gets absorbed into this core.

na caiva sukṛtaṃ vibhuḥ

"Nor merit either, says the all-pervading"

Sukṛtam is well-doing, good action, merit. And crucially: this too is not absorbed. Most people nod along when told the self does not carry sin. But merit? We want the self to own that. We want to be our good deeds. The word 'vibhu' means the all-pervading, the one not confined to any single location or form. It is the same quality as space. Space does not become pure because a temple is built inside it, and it does not become impure because a trash heap is placed inside it. The space itself is unaffected. The symmetry here is deliberate and important. Pāpa and sukṛta (sin and merit) are treated as the same kind of thing: weather that passes through. Neither sticks to the one who is watching.

ajñānena āvṛtaṃ jñānam

"Knowledge covered over by not-knowing"

Jñāna here is not intellectual knowledge, not information. It is the direct seeing of what you actually are. It is the capacity of the mind, when clear, to recognize its own ground. Ajñāna is not stupidity or lack of education. It is the specific not-knowing of one's own nature. And āvṛtam means covered, veiled, blocked from view. Not destroyed. Not removed. Covered. This is the critical detail: the knowing is still there. It has not been taken away. Something is sitting on top of it. That something is the habitual assumption that you are the accumulator of your history, the owner of your record, the sum of what you have done and had done to you. Remove the covering and the knowing is right there. You were not building toward it. It was always already present.

tena muhyanti jantavaḥ

"Because of this, living beings get confused"

'Muhyanti' comes from 'muh', to be confused, to be stupefied, to lose one's sense of orientation. It is the same root as 'moha', the word used repeatedly for Arjuna's state at the start of the Gītā. 'Jantavaḥ' means creatures, living beings, animate entities of all kinds. Not just humans. The confusion is described as a general condition of living things, not a special human failure. So the mechanism is clean: jñāna (clear seeing of what you are) is present. Ajñāna (not-knowing) covers it. The result is moha (confusion about what is real). And from that confusion, the whole drama of suffering follows: the mistaken identification with the accumulating story, the fear of losing what has been gained, the shame about what has been done.

3.What is really happening

A.The self as non-absorbing space

The verse draws a precise distinction between the actions passing through experience and the witnessing core through which they pass. Actions happen. Consequences happen. But the one who is aware of all this does not become those things. The mistake is not that you act or suffer consequences; the mistake is thinking something at your center has been marked, branded, or made heavier by what has occurred.

B.Why the symmetry of sin and merit matters

Most people can accept, intellectually, that they should not carry guilt forever. Fewer are willing to accept that they should not carry pride forever either. But the verse holds them as the same category. Clinging to your merit is the same structural error as carrying your sin. Both are the self misidentifying as its own history. Both keep the covering in place.

C.Ignorance as covering, not absence

The exact word āvṛtam (covered over) matters. The clear seeing of your own nature is not something you earn or develop; it is something that is currently obscured. This shifts the entire project. You are not building a new capacity. You are removing what is sitting on top of one that already exists. That is a very different kind of work, and it does not require becoming someone else.

D.The confusion is described, not blamed

Krishna does not say beings are foolish, or bad, or spiritually lazy. He says they are confused because of this covering. The tone is diagnostic, not moralistic. Confusion has a cause. The cause is identifiable. That means it can, in principle, be addressed. This is actually the more compassionate framing: it removes the layer of shame about being confused, which is itself another form of the same error.

4.Modern parallel

Person A carries a detailed internal ledger. The embarrassing thing they said in 2019 is still live. The time they did something genuinely good is stored as proof of worth. Their mood shifts based on whether the ledger currently looks favorable. They are, functionally, the sum of their record. When the record is bad, they feel bad about what they are, not just what they did. Person B has made a different structural move. They still notice consequences, still feel regret or satisfaction. But they no longer identify the thing watching all this with the thing being watched. The 2019 embarrassment is information about a past action. It is not a brand on the watcher. The ledger still exists; they just stopped being it. Their attention is freed up for what is actually happening now.

Today's world · 2026

Therapy culture, social media, and the self-help industry have converged on making the self into an accumulating project. Your trauma defines you, your wins brand you, your failures are your story. The pressure to have a coherent, curated identity narrative is relentless.

This verse is pointing at something that cuts directly against that: the part of you doing the noticing is not identical to the story being noticed. The story is real. The consequences are real. But the watcher is not the ledger.

In practical terms: you can do the work of addressing what needs addressing without treating your mistakes as evidence of what you fundamentally are. That distinction is not denial. It is precision.

→What comes next

Verse 5.16 follows immediately with the resolution: when that covering of not-knowing is lifted by jñāna, the sun of knowing illuminates everything, like a light turned on in a room that was never actually dark. When ready, say: "5.16"