टीका

Commentary

This verse brings together three qualities that define the truly free person. First: yoga-sanyasta-karmanam — one who has renounced the fruits of action through yoga. This does not mean physical inaction. It means acting without clinging to outcomes, offering every action as a service to the Divine and releasing the result. The yoga here is karma yoga — the yoga of devoted, unattached action.

Second: gnaana-sanchhinna-samshayam — whose doubts have been cut by knowledge. The word sanchhinna is strong — completely severed, not merely weakened. The doubts that bind a person to confusion and indecision — doubts about the nature of the self, about one’s relationship with the Divine, about the purpose of action — these have been fully resolved through direct knowledge.

Third: aatmavantam — self-possessed. This is one of the most evocative descriptions in the Gita. To be aatmavant is to be established in the Self, to have the Self as one’s support and reference point. Such a person is not dependent on external circumstances for their ground. They are grounded in what does not change.

For this person, na karmaani nibadhnanti — actions do not bind. This is the freedom the Gita speaks of throughout: not freedom from action, but freedom within action. The liberated person acts, sometimes vigorously — Arjuna is being asked to fight! — but the actions leave no residue, create no new bondage, because there is no ego-attachment at the center of them.

Historical Context

The concept of aatmavant — being established in the self — appears across the Upanishads as the mark of the jivanmukta, the one liberated while still living. Such a person continues to act in the world but is not of it in the sense of being bound by it. This verse affirms that such freedom is the natural consequence of the combination of yoga and knowledge — it is not a state reserved for monks who have physically renounced the world.