Chapter 13 · 35 verses
क्षेत्रक्षेत्रज्ञविभागयोगः
Kṣetra-kṣetrajña-vibhāga-yoga
The field and its knower
What is experienced, and who is the one who knows?
This map follows the 35-verse numbering that includes Arjuna’s opening question. Editions that omit or leave that question unnumbered count 34 verses.
What is experienced, and who knows the experience? Krishna calls the body a field, then asks Arjuna to distinguish its changing conditions from the knower without losing sight of the divine presence in every field.
What happens here
A turn in the
conversation.
This edition includes Arjuna's opening question as verse 13.1. Editions that omit it number the following verses one lower. The question names nature, the person, the field, its knower, knowledge, and what is to be known. Krishna begins with an accessible distinction: this body is the field, and the one who knows it is called its knower. He immediately widens the account by identifying himself as knower in all fields.
The field includes more than visible bodily material. Elements, senses, mind, understanding, the sense of ego, desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, awareness, and constancy are named. Much that ordinarily feels like the unquestionable centre of 'me' belongs among the conditions to be understood. This does not make those conditions worthless. It changes the inquiry from simply defending an identity to examining how experience is constituted.
Knowledge is then described through a surprising list of dispositions: humility, non-harming, patience, honesty, self-restraint, attention to suffering, devotion, and steadiness in inquiry. The knower's manner of life is part of the question of knowing. Krishna next describes what is to be known through language that crosses ordinary oppositions: within and without, moving and unmoving, undivided yet appearing divided, the light of lights present in every heart.
The later movement distinguishes nature's activity from the person's experience, and describes a supreme presence within the body. Several ways of coming to understanding are acknowledged, including meditation, discernment, action, and attentive hearing. The chapter culminates in equal vision and freedom from misidentifying the self with nature's action. Its closing images, space unstained and one sun illuminating a whole world, clarify without exhausting the distinction.
What are the field, its knower, knowledge, and what is to be known?
The body is the field. Know me also as the knower in every field.
See what changes, what knows, and the undivided presence within all beings.
Chapter essence
Freedom requires discernment between the changing field and its knower, joined with humility, devotion, and equal vision. Knowledge concerns how one lives and sees, not only what one can define.
Key movements
Follow the
argument.
13.1–7
The field is wider than the visible body
The opening distinction begins with the body but soon includes mental and affective conditions. Desire and aversion, pleasure and pain, ego and understanding belong to the account of the field. The metaphor invites investigation: a field is where processes occur, not merely an object viewed from outside. Krishna's statement about knowing every field prevents the inquiry from remaining a private division between one individual's mind and body. The account reaches toward the relation between embodied knowledge and divine knowing.
13.8–12
The character of a knower
Humility, absence of pretence, non-harming, patience, straightforwardness, service, purity, and steadiness are called knowledge. The list continues through dispassion, awareness of mortality, non-possessiveness, devotion, and sustained inquiry. It does not replace thought with a moral checklist. It asks what conditions allow a person to see without continually distorting the object to defend the ego. Intellectual acuity alone is not enough if pride, injury, and grasping continue to govern the attention through which knowledge is sought.
13.13–19
What resists ordinary categories
Brahman is described as beginningless and beyond the categories of being and non-being. Hands, eyes, and hearing are everywhere, though it is without ordinary senses. It is near and far, divided in appearance and undivided in reality. These paired statements resist reducing the ultimate to a familiar object. They are not offered as a puzzle solved by ignoring one side. The passage ends by placing knowledge, its object, and its attainment in the heart of everyone, joining metaphysical breadth with inward presence.
13.20–27
Nature, experience, and their conjunction
Nature and the person are called beginningless. Nature accounts for changes and the operation of embodied instruments; the person is associated with experiencing pleasure and pain. Attachment to the qualities is linked with repeated birth. A supreme person within the body is then described as witness, permitter, sustainer, and lord. Traditions differ in how they explain the relations among these terms. The chapter's practical movement remains toward understanding their conjunction instead of treating every changing condition as the complete self.
13.28–35
The vision that frees
The one who truly sees recognizes the supreme lord equally present in beings that perish. The text links this vision with non-injury, non-agency of the self, and the recognition of multiplicity resting in one. Space and sunlight offer the final images. Space is not stained by what occurs within it; one sun illuminates an entire world. These images illuminate the relation of self and field without inviting contempt for embodied life. The chapter ends with discernment and release, not the mere naming of categories.
Selected key verses
Stay with the words.
The Sanskrit, an original translation, and a way into the meaning.
Bhagavad Gita 13.3Krishna · in the dialogue
The knower in every field
Know me also as the knower in every field, descendant of Bharata. Knowledge of the field and its knower is what I regard as knowledge.
Original King of Dwarka translation · Complete verse
Why this verse matters
Krishna widens the opening body-and-knower distinction by identifying himself as knower in all fields. The question is no longer only how one person experiences one body. Knowledge concerns the field, its knower, and a divine presence that exceeds the boundaries of an individual field. In editions without Arjuna's opening question, this is numbered 13.2.
Explore deeper
Different traditions interpret the relation between the individual knower and Krishna in different ways. The verse should not be made to settle that difference through an unmarked addition to the translation. What it clearly does is prevent a purely private account of self-knowledge from exhausting the chapter. The inquiry will include nature, embodied experience, equal vision, and the supreme presence within the body, all within the distinction announced here.
Bhagavad Gita 13.12Krishna · in the dialogue
What knowledge is for
constancy in knowledge of the self and insight into the purpose of knowing reality: this is declared to be knowledge. What is otherwise is ignorance.
Original King of Dwarka translation · Complete verse
Why this verse matters
This verse completes a list that begins with humility and non-harming. Constancy in self-knowledge and attention to the purpose of knowing reality belong with those dispositions. Knowledge is therefore not treated as information detached from the character and orientation of the person who seeks it. This verse is 13.11 in editions that omit the opening question.
Explore deeper
The sharp contrast with ignorance should be read through the whole list, not reduced to agreement with a slogan. Pride, pretence, possessiveness, and unstable attention can shape what a person is willing to recognize. The chapter asks how those conditions change. The purpose of knowledge matters as well: inquiry directed toward freedom has a different orientation from inquiry undertaken only to secure status, win an argument, or protect an already cherished image of oneself.
Bhagavad Gita 13.28Krishna · in the dialogue
The imperishable within the perishing
One who sees the supreme lord present equally in all beings, not perishing when they perish, truly sees.
Original King of Dwarka translation · Complete verse
Why this verse matters
True seeing recognizes the supreme lord equally present in beings that perish. The verse preserves both sides: embodied lives change and end, while the divine presence is not exhausted by those changes. Equal vision is not a denial of vulnerability. In the following verse it is linked with non-injury. Other editions number this verse 13.27.
Explore deeper
The distinction can be distorted if the imperishable is used to dismiss bodily suffering. The chapter's account of knowledge has already included non-harming and attention to the pain of birth, death, age, and illness. Those concerns remain active here. To see equally is to refuse a final division between lives that count and lives that do not, while recognizing a presence that is not measured by the changing condition of any one body.
Read the full chapter
The whole conversation
matters.
All 35 verses, with Sanskrit, IAST transliteration and original King of Dwarka English.
Read Chapter 1335 verses · Sanskrit & English
Use the peacock feather above to mark your place. Sources & editions
13.1Arjuna
Arjuna asked: Keshava, I wish to understand nature and the person, the field and the knower of the field, knowledge and what is to be known.
This edition numbers Arjuna's opening question as 13.1 and therefore has 35 verses in Chapter 13, 701 overall. In editions with 34 verses here, our 13.2 corresponds to 13.1, and subsequent numbers are one lower.
13.2Krishna
Krishna said: This body, son of Kunti, is called the field. Those who understand these things call the one who knows it the knower of the field.
13.3
Know me also as the knower in every field, descendant of Bharata. Knowledge of the field and its knower is what I regard as knowledge.
13.4
Hear from me briefly what that field is, what it is like, how it changes and from what it arises; and who its knower is and what its power is.
13.5
Sages have sung of this in many ways, in varied sacred verses, and in reasoned, decisive statements concerning Brahman.
13.6
The great elements, the sense of 'I', understanding, the unmanifest, the ten senses and the one mind, and the five objects of sense;
13.7
desire, aversion, pleasure, pain, the bodily aggregate, awareness, and constancy: this is a brief account of the field together with its changes.
13.8
Humility, absence of pretence, non-harming, patience, straightforwardness, service to the teacher, purity, steadiness, and self-restraint;
13.9
dispassion toward sense objects, freedom from egotism, and attention to the suffering and limitation in birth, death, old age, and illness;
13.10
non-attachment, freedom from possessive involvement with children, spouse, home, and the like, and continual evenness of mind when welcome or unwelcome events arrive;
13.11
unwavering devotion to me through undivided yoga, a preference for secluded places, and no delight in crowds;
13.12
constancy in knowledge of the self and insight into the purpose of knowing reality: this is declared to be knowledge. What is otherwise is ignorance.
13.13
I will explain what is to be known, knowing which one reaches immortality: beginningless, supreme Brahman, spoken of as neither being nor non-being.
Anādimat paraṃ brahma is read here as beginningless, supreme Brahman. Another division, anādi mat-paraṃ, reads the beginningless Brahman as having Krishna as its highest ground. This is a substantive interpretive difference, not merely a change of English style.
13.14
Its hands and feet are everywhere; its eyes, heads, and faces are everywhere. Hearing everywhere in the world, it remains encompassing all.
13.15
It shines through the functions of every sense, yet is without any senses. Unattached, it sustains all; free from the qualities, it nevertheless experiences the qualities.
13.16
It is outside beings and within them, unmoving and moving. Because of its subtlety it cannot be grasped; it is far away and also near.
13.17
Undivided, it appears to stand divided among beings. Know it as the sustainer of beings, as that which absorbs them, and as that which brings them forth.
13.18
It is the light even of lights, said to be beyond darkness. It is knowledge, what is to be known, and what is reached through knowledge, established in the heart of everyone.
13.19
Thus the field, knowledge, and what is to be known have been described briefly. Understanding this, my devotee becomes fit to reach my being.
13.20
Know nature and the person as both without beginning. Know changes and qualities as arising from nature.
13.21
Nature is said to be the cause in the activity of effects and instruments; the person is said to be the cause in the experience of pleasure and pain.
13.22
The person situated in nature experiences the qualities born of nature. Attachment to these qualities is the cause of birth in favourable and unfavourable wombs.
13.23
The highest person in this body is called the witness, the one who permits, the sustainer, the experiencer, the great lord, and the supreme self.
13.24
Whoever thus knows the person and nature together with the qualities is not born again, whatever that person's present circumstances.
13.25
Some see the self within the self by the self through meditation; others through the yoga of discerning knowledge, and others through the yoga of action.
13.26
Others, not understanding in this way, worship after hearing from others. They too pass beyond death through their devotion to what they have heard.
13.27
Whatever being comes into existence, moving or unmoving, know it to arise from the union of the field and the knower of the field, foremost of the Bharatas.
13.28
One who sees the supreme lord present equally in all beings, not perishing when they perish, truly sees.
13.29
Seeing the lord present equally everywhere, one does not injure the self through the self, and so reaches the highest destination.
13.30
One who sees that actions are performed entirely by nature, and that the self is not the doer, truly sees.
13.31
When one sees the separate existence of beings resting in one, and their expansion from that same one, one attains Brahman.
13.32
Because it has no beginning and is without qualities, this supreme self is imperishable. Though present in the body, son of Kunti, it neither acts nor is stained.
13.33
As all-pervading space is unstained because of its subtlety, so the self, present throughout the body, is not stained.
13.34
As the one sun illuminates this entire world, so the knower of the field illuminates the whole field, descendant of Bharata.
13.35
Those who see through the eye of knowledge the distinction between the field and its knower, and release from the nature of beings, reach the highest.
A deeper reading
Questions worth
remaining with.
13.2–7, 20–24
Distinction is not a simple mind-body split
A modern reader may initially map the field onto the physical body and the knower onto ordinary mental activity. The text complicates that mapping by including mind, understanding, ego, desire, and awareness within its description of the field. The inquiry is therefore deeper than contrasting a material exterior with a private psychological interior. It asks what knows these processes and how that knowing relates to a reality not exhausted by their changes.
Krishna's presence as knower in every field and as supreme person within the body makes the issue explicitly theological. Advaita, Vishishtadvaita, and other traditions interpret the relations differently. An introductory companion should identify that interpretive space rather than quietly presenting one account as an uncontested definition. The metaphor remains useful precisely because it opens an investigation. It should not be used to dismiss the body's needs or to deny the significance of another person's experience.
13.8–12
Humility has an intellectual purpose
Calling humility knowledge can seem unexpected if knowledge is imagined only as correct propositions. The list gives attention an ethical setting. Pretence asks the world to confirm an image of the knower; aggression can silence what would challenge that image; possessiveness narrows concern to what serves it. The dispositions named here make room for an inquiry less controlled by self-protection. Their value is not merely decorative goodness added after understanding has been secured.
The list also includes devotion, solitude, and sustained concern with the purpose of knowing reality. These belong to the chapter's contemplative world. A modern reader need not turn every item into a literal programme of social withdrawal in order to recognize the question it raises. What habits support truthful attention? What habits continually distort it? The chapter treats those questions as internal to philosophy rather than as optional consequences of having finished the intellectual work.
13.28–35
Seeing equally while beings change
The supreme presence is described as not perishing when beings perish. This does not make embodied beings incapable of suffering or loss. The distinction is meaningful because their conditions do change. Equal vision is joined with the statement that one does not injure the self through the self, giving recognition an ethical consequence. A claim about what endures cannot responsibly be turned into indifference toward what is vulnerable.
The sun image also deserves precision. One light can illuminate a whole field without becoming identical with every object illuminated. The chapter uses such an image to clarify knowing, while other verses stress undivided reality within apparent multiplicity. Holding these movements together is more faithful than forcing a quick slogan upon them. The concluding 'eye of knowledge' names discernment capable of seeing both the field's changing processes and the freedom of what knows them.
Sources & editions
The complete chapter is above. These optional external editions support further study; their modern translations and commentaries belong to their publishers.
Text, translation & sources