Sanskrit
योगस्थः कुरु कर्माणि सङ्गं त्यक्त्वा धनञ्जय । सिद्ध्यसिद्ध्योः समो भूत्वा समत्वं योग उच्यते ॥
yogasthaḥ kuru karmāṇi saṅgaṃ tyaktvā dhanañjaya siddhyasiddhyoḥ samo bhūtvā samatvaṃ yoga ucyate
Translation
Perform action, O Dhananjaya, dwelling in union with the divine, renouncing attachments and balanced evenly in success and failure: equilibrium is called yoga.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Krishna gives the discipline from verse 47 its technical name. Perform action, but do it established in yoga — evenness of mind toward success and failure alike. That evenness, not any particular outcome, is what “yoga” means here: skill and steadiness in the doing, independent of how it turns out. This is the Gita defining its own central term in a single clause: samatvaṃ yoga ucyate, evenness is what yoga is called. Every later chapter’s “yoga of X” is a variation on this baseline; samatva is the invariant.
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Word by word
- yogasthaḥ kuru karmāṇiयोगस्थः कुरु कर्माणि
- established in yoga, perform actions (yoga-sthaḥ + kuru + karmāṇi)
- saṅgaṃ tyaktvāसङ्गं त्यक्त्वा
- abandoning attachment (saṅgam + tyaktvā)
- dhanañjayaधनञ्जय
- O Dhanañjaya
- siddhyasiddhyoḥ samo bhūtvāसिद्ध्यसिद्ध्योः समो भूत्वा
- having become even in success and failure (siddhi-asiddhyoḥ + samaḥ + bhūtvā)
- samatvaṃसमत्वं
- evenness
- yoga ucyateयोग उच्यते
- is called yoga (yoga + ucyate)
Commentary
Site Commentary
The order here matters: “established in yoga, perform action” — the steadiness comes first, as the platform to act from, not as a result you might feel once the outcome resolves. Most people wait to see how something turns out before deciding whether to feel calm about it; this verse reverses the sequence, asking for the equanimity to be secured in advance of acting, not extracted from the result afterward.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
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Lessons
Personal
- Try to secure your sense of steadiness before you act, not after you see how things turn out — waiting for the outcome to grant you peace of mind gets the sequence backwards, and it's a far less controllable trigger than deciding to be steady first.
Professional
- Before starting a high-stakes initiative, get your team's composure and process discipline settled in advance rather than hoping a good result will produce it — teams that wait for outcomes to feel calm about the work tend to make worse decisions under the resulting pressure.
Family & Social
- Before a difficult family conversation, settle your own composure beforehand rather than hoping the conversation's outcome will grant it to you — walking in steady changes how the conversation actually goes, which waiting for a good outcome can't.
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