Lord Krishna

Divine Teacher

The Supreme Lord, the charioteer and divine guide of Arjuna. Krishna delivers the eternal wisdom of the Gita, revealing the nature of the soul, duty, and the path to liberation.

Speaking: Chapter 18, Verse 13

Verse 13

The Yoga of Liberation through Renunciation

Learn from me, O mighty-armed one, the five causes for the accomplishment of all actions as declared in the Samkhya philosophy, which teaches the end of all action.

Context & Meaning

Krishna now pivots to a different register of analysis — the philosophical framework of Samkhya — to explain the mechanics of action itself. He is about to offer Arjuna a teaching that will dissolve the fundamental misidentification at the root of all suffering: the belief that "I am the doer." The five causes he will enumerate are drawn from Samkhya — the school of philosophical analysis — and they serve the Gita's purpose of siddhi: the completion and perfection of all action through the understanding of what action actually is. Mahābāhu — mighty-armed — is invoked here because the teaching requires a certain strength of mind to receive and integrate.

Scholar Commentaries

1 commentary · Public domain

Adi Shankaracharya

Advaita

Sāṃkhye kṛtānte — in the Samkhya teaching that brings action to its completion. The Advaita reading sees this passage as the culmination of the Gita's epistemological project: to show that the "doer" is a construct, a superimposition of the ego on the pure witnessing Self. When the five causes of action are properly understood, the sense of personal doership — ahaṃkāra as doer — is seen to be not a metaphysical fact but a cognitive error. And with the dissolution of the sense of doership, the burden of karma-bondage also dissolves.