Sanskrit
अक्षरं ब्रह्म परमं स्वभावोऽध्यात्ममुच्यते । भूतभावोद्भवकरो विसर्गः कर्मसंज्ञितः ॥
akṣaraṃ brahma paramaṃ svabhāvo'dhyātmam ucyate bhūtabhāvodbhavakaro visargaḥ karmasaṃjñitaḥ
Translation
The indestructible, the supreme is the Eternal; His essential nature is called Self-knowledge; the emanation that causes the birth of beings is named Action;
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Krishna’s answer begins, and the shift in speaker matters: from here through verse 4 he works through Arjuna’s list in the exact order it was asked. Brahman is defined as akshara, the indestructible — a term that becomes the chapter’s real subject from verse 20 onward, well after these opening definitions are finished. Note that “karma” here gets its narrowest possible sense: not the ethical discipline of desireless action from chapter 2, but the creative emanation (visarga) that brings beings into existence — a different use of the same word. Akṣara — “un-decaying” — is planted here as a definition and then left; verses 20–21 pick it back up as the chapter’s actual destination. Visarga as karma is the cosmological sense: the outpouring that starts a world, not a person’s deeds.
Study deeper
Word by word
- akṣaraṃ brahma paramaṃअक्षरं ब्रह्म परमं
- the imperishable is the supreme Brahman (akṣaram + brahma + paramam)
- svabhāvo'dhyātmam ucyateस्वभावोऽध्यात्मं उच्यते
- one's own nature is called adhyātma (svabhāvaḥ + adhyātmam + ucyate)
- bhūtabhāvodbhavakaroभूतभावोद्भवकरो
- the creative force that brings beings into being (bhūta-bhāva-udbhava-karaḥ)
- visargaḥ karmasaṃjñitaḥविसर्गः कर्मसंज्ञितः
- this offering-forth is named karma (visargaḥ + karma-saṃjñitaḥ)
Commentary
Site Commentary
The word karma appears here doing entirely different work than it does in chapter 2: there it named a whole ethical discipline of desireless action, here it names nothing more than the raw process of beings coming into existence. Krishna never flags the shift — the text simply trusts context to carry it, which means a reader importing the wrong sense of a familiar term from an earlier chapter will misread this one entirely.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Concepts
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Lessons
Personal
- When you carry a word's meaning from one context into another without checking, notice it — a word like "success" means something different applied to one hard week versus your whole life, and importing one sense into the other quietly distorts your judgment.
Professional
- When a term like "done" or "ready" gets reused across teams with different precise meanings, don't assume the shared word means shared understanding — verify what each side actually means by it before you build on the agreement.
Family & Social
- When a word like "fine" or "busy" recurs in a close relationship, check what it actually means in this instance rather than assuming it carries its usual sense — the same word can quietly mean different things depending on when it's said.
Ask yourself
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