18.2

The Sanskrit couplet balances the two definitions on strictly parallel grammar — desire-driven action renounced in one clause, the fruit of all action renounced in the other — so the distinction arrives less as an argument than as a shape the ear can catch before the sense fully lands. That built-in parallelism is doing real philosophical work: it’s what lets two words that sound like near-synonyms in ordinary speech get treated as structurally distinct for the rest of the chapter.

Each definition is credited to a different class of knower — “kavayaḥ,” the sages or poets, for sannyasa; “vicakṣaṇāḥ,” the discerning, for tyaga — rather than the verse simply saying “some call it this, others call it that” as competing opinions. That attribution implies a hierarchy of insight, not a disagreement: recognizing that giving up desire-driven action is a kind of renunciation is the more available observation, while seeing that only the fruit need be relinquished is credited to the sharper, more discriminating eye.