Chapter 05 · 29 verses
कर्मसंन्यासयोगः
Karma-sannyāsa-yoga
Renunciation within action
Must I leave the world to be free?
Also titled Sannyāsa-yoga, the discipline of renunciation, in traditional colophons.
If knowledge frees a person from action's binding force, should action itself be left behind? Arjuna asks for a clear choice, and Krishna changes the terms of the choice.
What happens here
A turn in the
conversation.
Arjuna hears two commendations in Krishna's teaching: renunciation of actions and disciplined action. He asks which is better. The question follows naturally from Chapter 4, where knowledge burns action and yet the final instruction is to rise. Rather than treating Arjuna's uncertainty as inattentiveness, the chapter makes it the point of entry. How can a person continue to participate in a world from which freedom is also being sought?
Krishna replies that both renunciation and the yoga of action lead to the highest good, while giving practical priority here to the yoga of action. A lasting renunciant is identified by freedom from hatred and craving. This shifts attention from visible withdrawal to the inward relation carried into conduct. The outward form still matters within the text's religious world, but it cannot alone establish whether a person is bound.
The teaching describes someone who acts with body, senses, mind, and understanding while relinquishing attachment. Ordinary activities continue: seeing, hearing, eating, moving, speaking. Knowledge changes the claim that a separate ego makes upon those processes. The lotus leaf, touched by water without being wetted, becomes an image for such participation. It suggests contact without adhesion, not an absence of contact with life.
The chapter then joins equal vision, inward happiness, restraint of desire and anger, and concern for the welfare of all beings. Its concluding movement anticipates meditation: senses, breath, and attention are gathered. Yet the last word is relational. Peace comes through knowing Krishna as lord, recipient of offering, and friend of all beings. Renunciation does not end in a self enclosed within its own achievement.
You commend renunciation and action in yoga. Which should I follow?
Both lead to the highest good; action in yoga is the better course here.
Act without attachment, see with equality, and know the friend of all beings.
Chapter essence
Renunciation is tested within the relation to action: whether hatred, craving, and possessiveness bind the agent. Knowledge and disciplined action converge in freedom, equal vision, and peace.
Key movements
Follow the
argument.
5.1–6
A distinction that must not become a division
Krishna answers Arjuna's practical question without making renunciation worthless. The two ways can reach the same end when rightly followed. What he resists is the assumption that their external differences require opposed truths. For someone not established in yoga, renunciation is difficult; discipline prepares the ground. The passage asks readers to distinguish a path's form from its fulfilment. It also cautions against selecting a prestigious spiritual identity before examining the capacities and attachments of the person who would inhabit it.
5.7–12
Participation without adhesion
A long list of ordinary activities makes the teaching concrete. The senses continue to meet their objects. Yogis act through embodied faculties for purification, while relinquishing attachment. The lotus image gives a visual language to this possibility. The contrast is not between productive and unproductive people, but between action organized around possessive desire and action carried by a different understanding. The chapter therefore asks about a person's inward relation to work, without pretending that work has become unreal or unnecessary.
5.13–17
Agency, nature, and the light of knowledge
The body becomes a city with nine gates in which the embodied self resides. Krishna distinguishes the lord from the production of agency, action, and its fruits; nature operates, while ignorance covers knowledge. Commentarial traditions explain the identity of this lord and the status of agency differently. Their disagreement should not be hidden. What the sequence consistently rejects is the unexamined conviction that the private ego is the complete and independent source of everything that occurs.
5.18–23
Equal vision and a different happiness
The wise see equally across a startling range: a learned brahmin, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a person stigmatized by the social order. This is followed by an account of steadiness when pleasant and unpleasant things arrive. Both movements loosen the grip of ranking and preference. Sensory pleasure has a beginning and an end; wisdom does not ask it to provide what is lasting. Desire and anger must be borne without letting their surge become the ruler of conduct.
5.24–29
Inward freedom opens toward others
Happiness, delight, and light are described as inward. But the sages who reach liberation also delight in the welfare of all beings. The pairing prevents inwardness from being mistaken for indifference. Brief instructions about gaze and breathing lead into a gathered contemplative life, whose orientation remains liberation rather than performance. The chapter's final verse identifies Krishna as friend of every being. Peace is thus grounded in a relationship that exceeds both private acquisition and private serenity.
Selected key verses
Stay with the words.
The Sanskrit, an original translation, and a way into the meaning.
Bhagavad Gita 5.10Krishna · in the dialogue
The lotus and the water
One who acts, placing actions in Brahman and relinquishing attachment, is untouched by wrongdoing, as a lotus leaf is untouched by water.
Original King of Dwarka translation · Complete verse
Why this verse matters
The lotus leaf offers an image for acting without becoming attached to action. Water is present; the leaf is not withdrawn from its setting. Similarly, the person places actions in Brahman and relinquishes attachment rather than merely abandoning work. The verse concerns the inward conditions under which participation becomes binding.
Explore deeper
The image is easily made into a promise that nothing can affect a spiritually mature person. The text does not make the body invulnerable or erase consequences in the world. It describes freedom from the stain of possessive action. Read beside 5.11, the practical direction remains active: yogis work with body, mind, understanding, and senses for purification. Detachment changes the relation to action while leaving disciplined participation in view.
Bhagavad Gita 5.18Krishna · in the dialogue
A vision beyond rank
The wise see with equality a brahmin endowed with learning and humility, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a person who cooks dogs.
Original King of Dwarka translation · Complete verse
Why this verse matters
The verse places a learned brahmin, different animals, and a socially excluded person within one equal vision. Its force depends on the wide distances that the ancient social imagination placed between them. Wisdom does not erase their differences; it refuses to let those differences exhaust what is seen. The next verse links this equality with Brahman.
Explore deeper
The literal term for the last person is 'one who cooks dogs', an ancient expression associated with exclusion. Retaining that meaning requires a note, not endorsement of the stigma. The passage challenges a gaze organized solely by honour, status, or species. It does not offer a complete modern political programme, but its placement of the socially honoured and excluded in the same field of recognition remains philosophically and ethically consequential.
Bhagavad Gita 5.29Krishna · in the dialogue
The friend of every being
Knowing me as the recipient of sacrifice and austerity, the great lord of all worlds, and the friend of every being, one reaches peace.
Original King of Dwarka translation · Complete verse
Why this verse matters
The chapter's final verse names Krishna as the recipient of offering, lord of all worlds, and friend of all beings. Peace is connected with knowing this relationship. The movement from disciplined action through equal vision and meditation therefore ends in devotion, rather than in the isolated achievement of a self that needs no one.
Explore deeper
The word suhrit suggests a friend or well-wisher whose regard is not reduced to an exchange of advantages. Its scope here is all beings. That description prevents the devotee's peace from being imagined as divine preference for a private group alone. The verse gathers sacrifice, authority, and care into one account of Krishna. The meditation teaching that follows should be read within that theological horizon, not detached from it as a neutral technique.
Read the full chapter
The whole conversation
matters.
All 29 verses, with Sanskrit, IAST transliteration and original King of Dwarka English.
Read Chapter 529 verses · Sanskrit & English
Use the peacock feather above to mark your place. Sources & editions
5.1Arjuna
Arjuna asked: Krishna, you commend the renunciation of actions, and then again yoga. Tell me decisively which of these is better.
5.2Krishna
Krishna said: Both renunciation and the yoga of action lead to the highest good. Of the two, however, the yoga of action is better than renouncing actions.
5.3
Know as an enduring renunciant one who neither hates nor craves. Free of these opposing pulls, mighty-armed one, such a person is easily released from bondage.
5.4
The immature speak of the way of knowledge and the way of yoga as separate; the discerning do not. Established rightly in either, one gains the fruit of both.
5.5
The state reached by those who follow knowledge is also reached by those who follow yoga. Whoever sees knowledge and yoga as one truly sees.
5.6
Renunciation is difficult to attain without yoga, mighty-armed one. A contemplative established in yoga soon reaches Brahman.
5.7
Established in yoga, purified in self, master of oneself and one's senses, recognizing one's self as the self of all beings, a person is unstained even while acting.
5.8
One established in yoga who understands reality should know, 'I do nothing at all,' even while seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, walking, sleeping, or breathing,
5.9
speaking, releasing, receiving, opening or closing the eyes, holding to the understanding that the senses are moving among their objects.
5.10
One who acts, placing actions in Brahman and relinquishing attachment, is untouched by wrongdoing, as a lotus leaf is untouched by water.
5.11
Yogis act with body, mind, understanding, and even the senses alone, relinquishing attachment for the purification of the self.
5.12
One established in yoga relinquishes the results of action and attains abiding peace. One without that discipline, driven by desire and attached to results, is bound.
5.13
Mentally relinquishing all actions, the self-governed embodied one dwells happily in the city of nine gates, neither acting nor causing action.
5.14
The lord creates neither agency nor actions for the world, nor the joining of actions to their results. Rather, one's own nature operates.
Prabhu, 'lord', can be read as the self in its sovereignty or as the supreme Lord. The passage distinguishes true agency from the operations of conditioned nature; the commentarial traditions do not all locate that distinction in the same way.
5.15
The all-pervading one takes upon itself neither anyone's wrongdoing nor anyone's good deed. Knowledge is covered by ignorance; by this, beings are confused.
5.16
But for those whose ignorance of the self has been destroyed by knowledge, that knowledge lights up the highest reality like the sun.
5.17
Their understanding set on that, their self resting in that, established in that and taking that as their final aim, they reach the state from which there is no return, their impurities swept away by knowledge.
5.18
The wise see with equality a brahmin endowed with learning and humility, a cow, an elephant, a dog, and a person who cooks dogs.
5.19
Those whose minds rest in equality have overcome conditioned existence even here. Brahman is without defect and the same in all; therefore they are established in Brahman.
5.20
One who knows Brahman and stands in Brahman, steady in understanding and free of confusion, neither exults at receiving what is pleasant nor recoils at what is unpleasant.
5.21
Unattached to external contacts, one discovers happiness within the self. Joined through yoga to Brahman, one experiences happiness that does not diminish.
5.22
Pleasures born of contact are sources of suffering: they begin and end, son of Kunti. The discerning person does not seek delight in them.
5.23
Whoever can bear the surge arising from desire and anger here, before release from the body, is established in yoga and is a happy person.
5.24
One whose happiness is within, whose delight is within, and whose light is within becomes Brahman and reaches the peace of liberation in Brahman.
5.25
Sages whose impurities are exhausted, whose doubts are cut through, who govern themselves and delight in the welfare of all beings, attain liberation in Brahman.
5.26
For disciplined seekers freed from desire and anger, with minds restrained and self understood, liberation in Brahman is present on every side.
5.27
Keeping external contacts outside, directing the gaze between the eyebrows, and balancing the incoming and outgoing breaths moving within the nostrils,
5.28
the contemplative governs senses, mind, and understanding, intent on liberation. Free from desire, fear, and anger, such a person is always free.
5.29
Knowing me as the recipient of sacrifice and austerity, the great lord of all worlds, and the friend of every being, one reaches peace.
A deeper reading
Questions worth
remaining with.
5.8–15
What does 'I do nothing' mean?
The statement appears within the perspective of someone who knows reality and is established in yoga. It is not introduced as a sentence that anyone can repeat to dissolve accountability. The chapter simultaneously says that yogis perform action for purification. Its language separates bodily and mental processes from possessive identification; it does not ask the reader to deny that those processes affect a shared world.
Different traditions understand the self, nature, and the divine agent in distinct ways. An introductory translation should leave room for that philosophical depth instead of reducing every claim to modern psychology. At the practical level, the surrounding verses offer a safeguard: hatred, craving, attachment, and ignorance are being challenged. An interpretation that strengthens arrogance or excuses injury moves against that setting, however confidently it speaks of non-agency.
5.18–19
Equality is not a refusal to notice difference
The list in 5.18 crosses differences of species and social standing. Its force depends on those differences being visible. The wise are not said to confuse a cow with an elephant, or to lose the ability to recognize learning. They see without allowing these distinctions to become the final account of being. The following verse connects this equality with Brahman, giving it a metaphysical ground rather than merely a courteous manner.
The person described as a dog-cooker belongs to an ancient vocabulary of exclusion. Naming the term accurately does not require accepting the judgment embedded in that social order. The verse brings such a person into the same field of vision as the honoured brahmin. Contemporary reflection should attend to that destabilizing juxtaposition. Equal regard asks more than polite language; it challenges the habit of letting inherited rank determine whose life becomes fully visible.
5.21–29
Inward happiness and the common world
The critique of contact-born pleasures is directed at their instability and their capacity to become sources of suffering. It need not be read as contempt for embodied life. The chapter has already acknowledged ordinary activity and its place in purification. What changes is the demand that passing experience secure an enduring self. A pleasure may arrive, but it no longer has to carry the impossible task of being permanent.
The final verses keep this freedom connected to other beings. A contemplative who delights in their welfare cannot use inward peace as a reason to disregard them. Nor does the chapter conclude with mastery as a solitary possession. Krishna is named as the friend of all. That ending prepares for meditation while preserving the wider devotional horizon: discipline gathers the person, and the gathered person recognizes a relationship beyond the narrow boundaries of self-interest.
Sources & editions
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