18.66

This is the rhetorical destination of the entire eighteen-chapter poem: abandon all dharmas, come to Me alone for shelter, I will liberate you from all sins, do not grieve. After nine verses (40-48) spent grounding a whole ethics of birth-determined duty, Krishna relativizes all of it beneath a single unconditional act of surrender — dharma turns out to be real and binding, but not final. Later bhakti traditions, Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita and the Gaudiya Vaishnava schools among them, would build an entire theology of prapatti, total self-surrender, on this one verse, and the chapter’s own structure supports that weight: this is the third and final “shelter” (śaraṇam) invocation, after 62 and 65 primed the vocabulary, now arriving as command rather than description. It is arguably the single most theologically consequential line the text contains. Sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṃ śaraṇaṃ vraja — “let go of all dharmas; take refuge in Me alone.” The carama-śloka, the Gita’s culminating verse: past every rule and its threefold sort, the last instruction is surrender, answered by ahaṃ tvāṃ… mokṣayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ — “I will free you; do not grieve.” The poem ends where it began, with mā śucaḥ.