Chapter 18 · Verse 13·Spoken by Krishna
पञ्चैतानि महाबाहो कारणानि निबोध मे।सांख्ये कृतान्ते प्रोक्तानि सिद्धये सर्वकर्मणाम्
pañchaitāni mahā-bāho kāraṇāni nibodha me sānkhye kṛitānte proktāni siddhaye sarva-karmaṇām
Arjuna, learn from me these five causes for the accomplishment of all action, as taught in the Sankhya system where action comes to rest.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna announces that he is about to name five causes (karanani) that together bring about every action, and he asks Arjuna to learn them attentively from his own mouth. The address 'mighty-armed one' (maha-baho) and the call to 'learn from Me' (nibodha me) are not decoration. Several commentators read the phrase as a deliberate praising of the teaching: these five are hard to know and cannot be grasped by an inattentive mind, so Krishna first settles the listener before he speaks. The point is that these are the causes of all actions without exception (sarva-karmanam), and they are stated precisely for the accomplishment, the bringing-about, of every action; meaning that without these five working together no action gets done.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrī Puruṣottama · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Ramsukhdas · Lokmanya Tilak · Vedānta Deśika · Madhvācārya · Vallabhācārya
These five causes are not a stray piece of analysis; they are introduced to answer a pressing worry and to serve a single purpose: dislodging the false sense of being the doer. The worry is this: if a person renounces attachment and the fruit of action, surely the one who still acts must inherit the fruit of his action, just as the one who eats is filled or the one who takes an intoxicant becomes intoxicated. How then can the fruit not arise? Krishna's answer is to break the act into its five real factors and show that the self is not the true doer at all. Once one sees that action is carried by these five and not by the self, the conceit of agency (kartrtva-abhimana) can be set aside, and with it the smearing of action's fruit upon the self.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrī Jayatīrtha · Vallabhācārya · Swami Ramsukhdas · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Krishna grounds this teaching in scripture so that it does not rest on his word alone. The verse says these five are 'declared in the Sankhya, the krtanta.' The commentators unpack 'krtanta' (literally the end or conclusion of 'krta', action) along two lines that reinforce each other: it is the doctrine in which action reaches its settled conclusion, and it is the teaching in which action comes to its end. Many tie this to the Gita's own earlier word that 'all action without exception culminates wholly in knowledge' (4.33), and to the image of the well and the flood from 2.46: as all the use of a well is contained in a great body of water, so all the fruit of the action-enjoining scriptures is contained in the knowledge of the self. When knowledge of the self arises, action ceases. So the teaching about action's five causes is placed within the very doctrine whose aim is the knowledge that brings action to rest.
Braided from 7 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Sivananda · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrī Puruṣottama
The fruit of naming these five is discrimination: seeing that the self stands apart from the machinery of action. Jnaneshwar pictures the self as a neutral onlooker, like the sky in which clouds form from wind, water and heat without the sky doing anything, or like the still water beneath a boat moved by oar and breeze, or the clay that only gives support while the potter and wheel do the shaping. The five causes combine and produce the action; the self abides apart, neither the instrumental nor the material cause. To know these five rightly, then, is to come to know who the true non-doer is.
Sant Jñāneśvar · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
For these commentators 'Sankhya' here means the Vedanta, the Upanishadic teaching in which the self, Brahman, their oneness, and the means to that knowledge are reckoned up; it is emphatically not the dualist system of Kapila. The deep puzzle they press is why a treatise devoted to the non-dual self would even bother to set forth five worldly causes of action. Their answer is that the five are stated only in order to be rejected: action and its factors are wrongly superimposed on the self by ignorance, and the five are enumerated precisely so that this false superimposition can be cancelled by the knowledge of the self's reality. The self has no real connection with activity at all; nature does everything and the self is the silent witness. When self-knowledge dawns, agency, instrumentality and action, all superimposed, fall away, and the knower becomes one who has done all there is to do. So the five are 'limbs' set forth only to serve the single aim of non-dual knowledge, with no loss of that orientation.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here 'Sankhya' means the discriminating understanding, and 'krtanta' marks the conclusive section of teaching on how action is structured. What the Vedic understanding determines, when it dwells on the truth as it really stands, is that the supreme Self alone is the doer: he is the inner ruler who, having the body, the senses, the breaths and the individual self as his instruments, governs from within. This is grounded in the scriptural texts on the inner ruler ('he who, standing in the self, is within the self, whom the self does not know, whose body the self is, who governs the self from within, he is the inner ruler, the immortal') and 'the inner-entered ruler of people, the self of all'. So the five causes do not dissolve doership into nothing; they locate it. The body, senses and individual self are instruments of a real divine agent.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Dvaita
These commentators read 'Sankhya, the krtanta' as the settled conclusion of knowledge, the authoritative scripture, and they deliberately set aside two other construals: that 'Sankhya' means the system of Kapila (which they regard as censured) and that 'krtanta' refers to a place in the Upanishads where the mere cessation of completed action is taught (which they deny, since the Upanishads do not teach the abandonment of action). The reason the topic is reintroduced at all, marked by the word 'again', is to expound renunciation more fully and to resolve a real doubt: renunciation is not only laying aside desire-prompted action but also giving up the conceit of being the agent; yet if the self were simply a non-agent, the very conceit of agency would have no footing and agency would have to be admitted. The verse meets this by naming the causes of action as factors other than the self alone.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
Vallabha takes the Sankhya here as a teaching framed in accordance with the Veda that points to the supreme Person, the inner ruler (antaryamin), as the true agent, with body, senses, breath and the individual self as his instruments, citing the same inner-ruler scriptures. But he draws a distinctive double conclusion: the Lord as inner ruler will be set down as the fifth and highest cause, and this very sovereign agency, in the part-soul that is the individual self, is ever pure as a participation in the Lord, while only the merely material kind of agency is to be denied of the individual self. So the doctrine protects the individual self's real agency as a part of Brahman while keeping the Lord as the master-cause. Purushottama frames the verse as answering directly how the fruit can fail to arise for one who has renounced attachment and fruit; the 'krtanta' is the very doctrine that decides the question of renunciation versus non-renunciation, where the analysis of action reaches its conclusion.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Kashmir Shaivism
Abhinavagupta reads the verse as exposing a mistake: even in ordinary life all five causes of action are present, yet people blinded by ignorance forcibly lay upon their own self the whole burden of being the doer of everything, and so they bind the self by their own cognition alone, while in the way things truly stand there is no bondage for the self. 'Krtanta' is the settled doctrine in which the conclusion is reached. He also records the views of 'others': some take the 'seat' (adhishthana) as that which is borne in the understanding, derived from rajas and transformed into a fivefold set of forms, named 'the discipline of action'; and some hold the seat to be the Lord. His own emphasis is that the man whose understanding is unsettled partakes of bondage, while the one whose insight is settled, firm in casting off egoity, does not.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Modern
Sivananda follows the Advaita line plainly: the self has no connection whatever with activity, nature does everything, the self is the silent witness, and 'krtanta' (the end of actions) signals that Vedantic knowledge of the self puts an end to all action. Ramsukhdas, writing as a non-sectarian devotional Vedantin, draws out a larger practical purpose: the samkhya-doctrine and the karma-yoga doctrine meet at one point, that the doership of the self is a mistake, since the self is neither doer nor enjoyer in the true sense and the karmas are accomplished by the play of five causes which are all nature's. The samkhya removes the conceit of agency by discrimination, karma-yoga removes it by the spirit of sacrifice and the surrender of fruit; either way the same self stands free. So the five causes are not mere analysis but a spiritual practice for dissolving the conceit of agency. Tilak reads the verse straightforwardly as naming five 'essentials' or causes, mentioned in Samkhya philosophy, for anything to happen.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Lokmanya Tilak
A Seeker Asks
If everything I do is really carried by five impersonal causes and not by me, am I being told I am not responsible for my actions, or being shown how to stop falsely owning them?
The verse is not handing you an excuse; it is naming the worry it intends to cure. The very reason Krishna breaks action into five causes is to answer the objection that whoever acts must inherit the fruit of his action, the way the one who eats is filled. The teaching aims to free you from the smearing of that fruit, not to license carelessness.
Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
What is being dissolved is a specific false claim: the conceit that 'I, the self, am the sole doer of everything.' Commentators describe this as a burden people forcibly lay upon themselves out of ignorance, binding themselves by their own cognition alone, while in truth there is no such bondage for the self. Seeing the five real factors at work is how that false self-ownership is set aside.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrī Jayatīrtha
And the freedom is not idleness. Renunciation here is not merely dropping desire-driven action but giving up the inner conceit of being the agent; the same insight is reached either by discrimination that watches the self stand apart from nature's machinery, or by acting in the spirit of sacrifice and surrendering the fruit. The self remains the silent witness while the work goes on, and by that very seeing the self stands free.
Śrī Jayatīrtha · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Sant Jñāneśvar
Contemplation
Ramsukhdas turns this verse into a practice rather than a theory. He points out that the path of discrimination and the path of selfless action meet at a single point: the sense that 'I am the doer' is simply a mistake, because every action is accomplished by the working together of five causes that all belong to nature, not to you. You can loosen that mistaken sense in two ways that lead to the same freedom. By discrimination, watch closely as you act and notice that the body, the senses, the movements and the rest are doing the work, while the witnessing self stands apart. By the spirit of sacrifice, offer the action and let go of its fruit, so that ownership has nothing to cling to. The five causes Krishna is about to name are therefore not a list to memorize but a means to dissolve the conceit of agency. Either way, he says, the same self stands free.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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