Bhagavad Gita 2.47: a close reading of the most quoted verse

The Sanskrit, clause by clause

The verse in transliteration: karmany evadhikaras te ma phaleshu kadachana / ma karmaphalahetur bhur ma te sango 'stv akarmani.

Read as four short clauses: karmani eva adhikarah te — "in action alone is your adhikara" (right, entitlement, proper scope); ma phaleshu kadachana — "never in the fruits [of action], at any time"; ma karma-phala-hetuh bhuh — "do not become one whose motive is the fruit of action"; ma te sangah astu akarmani — "let there also not be, for you, attachment to inaction." That fourth clause rarely survives into popular quotation, and its absence changes the verse's balance considerably: it is not simply "don't care about results," it is a two-sided instruction — don't be motivated by the fruit, and don't use that as an excuse to stop acting either.

What adhikara actually carries

The word usually rendered "right" is adhikara, a term with a specific classical sense of proper jurisdiction, entitlement or sphere of authority — closer to "this and only this is properly yours to do" than to a modern rights-claim in the political or legal sense. Some translators (Radhakrishnan among them) render it "right"; others prefer "concern" or "business" to avoid importing modern rights-language into a very different conceptual world. The choice matters: "you have a right to act" can sound like a permission or an entitlement being granted, while "action alone is your proper sphere" reads more like a statement about where responsibility legitimately lies and where it does not.

Where translators diverge

Comparing renderings side by side shows how much interpretive weight sits on a handful of words. Some translations keep close to the literal structure, preserving the fourfold clause pattern; others compress the verse into a more aphoristic two-line couplet for readability, which is where much of the slogan-like circulation online originates, often without the fourth clause at all. Translators also differ on sanga — some render it "attachment," others "clinging" or "craving" — and on whether akarmani in the final clause means "inaction" in the sense of doing nothing, or the specific philosophical position of renunciation of action (sannyasa) that chapter 3 goes on to discuss at length. The difference matters for how strongly the verse is read as anti-quietist: is Krishna warning generally against passivity, or specifically against the renunciate position some in his audience might have found attractive as an alternative to fighting?

What the verse does and does not license

The instruction most consistently supported across translations and commentaries is this: do not let the anticipated outcome be the reason you act, and do not let it govern your inner state while you act. This is compatible with working carefully, wanting a good result, and being disappointed by a bad one; it targets the psychological dependency of self-worth or motivation on a particular outcome, not the existence of preferences about outcomes. What the verse does not license, on any serious reading, is carelessness, indifference to consequences for others, or citing "detachment" as a reason not to try. The fourth clause is there specifically to close off the reading that would turn 2.47 into a justification for disengagement. Gita 3.8, a few dozen verses later, reinforces this by calling inaction not only inferior but practically impossible.

Shankara and Ramanuja on the verse

Shankara reads 2.47 within his broader argument that liberating knowledge, not action itself, is the final cause of freedom; on his reading, unattached action of the kind 2.47 describes purifies the mind and prepares it for the knowledge that actually liberates, rather than liberating on its own. Ramanuja, writing from a devotional (Vishishtadvaita) standpoint, reads the same verse as pointing toward surrender of the fruits of action to God as an act of devotion in itself, giving the verse a more directly devotional charge than Shankara's more intellectualist reading. Both agree on the surface instruction — do not act for the sake of fruit — while placing it in different larger arguments about what actually secures liberation.

Reading it as a slogan versus reading it in context

The verse's fame as a stand-alone quotation is partly what has made it so easy to misuse: stripped of its neighbours (2.48–2.51, which describe the steadiness of buddhi yoga the verse is building toward) and stripped of its final clause, it can be pressed into service for almost any argument about not worrying about outcomes, including some quite far from anything the Gita is actually claiming. Reading 2.47 alongside 2.48's instruction to remain even-minded in success and failure, and alongside the fuller discussion of unattached action in chapter 3 (see /resources/karma/what-is-karma-yoga and /resources/karma/nishkama-karma), gives a considerably more precise and more demanding picture than the four words most people actually remember.

Madhusudana Sarasvati's gloss

Alongside Shankara and Ramanuja, the sixteenth-century Advaita commentator Madhusudana Sarasvati, in his Gudhartha Dipika ("lamp on the hidden meaning"), offers a close reading of 2.47 worth setting beside the two better-known commentaries. Madhusudana pays particular attention to the word eva in the first clause (karmany evadhikaras te), an emphatic particle usually left untranslated or rendered loosely as "alone" or "only". He reads it as restricting the scope of the statement quite deliberately: your entitlement is to action, and to action only, not to its fruit and not, on his reading, to any specific manner of the action's unfolding either. This close attention to a single untranslatable particle is a reminder of how much philological labour sits behind a verse usually met only in paraphrase, and it is one reason serious readers of the Gita return to commentary rather than relying on a single English rendering, however fluent.

2.47 and buddhi yoga: where the verse is heading

The verse is frequently quoted as though it were self-contained, but Krishna's own argument treats it as a stepping stone toward buddhi yoga, introduced two verses later at 2.49–2.50: the discipline of even-minded intelligence (buddhi) that judges action correctly rather than being pulled about by attachment to results. Gita 2.50 states that a person disciplined in buddhi casts off both good and bad action in this life and reaches a state described as skill in action (yogah karmasu kaushalam) — a striking phrase, since it defines the goal not as withdrawal from action but as a kind of competence in it. Reading 2.47 as an isolated statement about detachment, without following the argument to 2.50's claim about skill, risks losing exactly the point the sequence is building toward: that even-mindedness about the fruit is presented as the condition for acting well, not as an alternative to acting well.

What the verse does not say about caste or gender

It is worth stating plainly what 2.47 does not address, given how often the verse is lifted into general life advice untethered from its setting. The verse says nothing about who is entitled to which action; that question is addressed elsewhere in the Gita, notably at 18.41–18.44, where duties are distributed according to the guna-based caste categories the text assumes, a scheme modern readers generally do not adopt as social policy. 2.47 itself is a statement about the psychological relationship between an actor and the fruit of whatever action is already theirs to perform, not a claim about how action should be allocated across a society. Conflating the two — treating "you have a right only to action" as though it settled who should do what — reads a claim into the verse that its own words do not make.