Āṅgan No. 4
This verse hangs in every Indian office. Almost everyone stops reading halfway.
Karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana. You have the right to work, never to its fruits. It is on office walls, desk calendars and exam halls across India.
Most people stop there, and it starts to sound like permission to stop caring about results.
The verse has two more lines. Do not make the fruit of action your motive. And the last one, the one nobody prints: mā te saṅgo ’stv akarmaṇi. Do not be attached to doing nothing either.
It is not permission to stop caring. It is an order to keep working.
Arjuna asked his. Samvāda answers yours with the Gītā's own verses.
Samvāda is software, an AI companion tuned to the Bhagavad Gītā. It is not a person. It answers from the verse and shows you which one, and it never pretends to be Kṛṣṇa.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि।।
karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ’stvakarmaṇi
You have the right to work alone, but not to the fruits of it. Do not be driven by the results of your work, nor have attachment to inaction.
2.47 is verse 94 of 700, and verse 47 of 72 in chapter 2.
Akarmaṇi (in inaction), in this form, appears in 2 verses of the 700: 2.47 and 4.18.
Phala (fruit; aphala not counted), in any form, appears in 28 verses of the 700, first at 2.43 and last at 18.34.
Counted by Vāṇi on the 700-verse text at getvani.app/gita.
2.47 is one verse with four parts, and the poster usually shows only the first. Kṛṣṇa says you have a right to action alone, never to its fruits. He adds that the fruit must not be your motive, and last, that you must not be attached to inaction. Read as a whole, it is a verse about working without being driven by results, and it closes the door on doing nothing. The next verse, 2.48, tells Arjuna how to do it: give up attachment, stay established in yoga, treat success and failure alike, and perform the work. Evenness of mind, it says, is yoga. The verse before, 2.46, offers an image of how little a reservoir matters to a thirsty person who already has water on every side. All of it sits in chapter 2, and what the Gītā says about purpose follows the idea further.