Krishna opens with an ancient image: a fig tree growing upside down, roots above, branches below, its leaves the sacred hymns. Its branches spread in every direction, fed by nature's strands, budding with pleasures, its lower roots binding people to action in the world. Its true shape cannot be seen from where you stand. Take the axe of non-attachment and cut it down. Then seek the place from which there is no returning, the ancient source. Every living soul is an eternal fragment of Krishna, drawing to itself the five senses and the mind, carrying them from body to body the way wind carries fragrance from flowers. The deluded never see this; only the eye of knowledge sees. Krishna names himself as the light in the sun that floods the world, the light in the moon and in fire. He enters the earth and holds every creature up. He sits in every heart; from him come memory, knowing, and forgetting. He is what the scriptures aim at, the one who made them, and the one who knows them. Then the teaching arrives at its summit. Two persons stand in the world: the perishable and the imperishable. All beings perish; the unchanging does not. But higher than both stands another — the supreme self, the undying lord who enters and carries the three worlds. Scripture and world alike name this the highest person, puruṣottama. Whoever knows this, clear-eyed, knows everything and loves with everything. The chapter is the shortest distillation of the Gita's entire structure: the world you see is real but rooted in something you cannot see, and above both stands something that holds them both. To know that is to be done. Nothing needed remains.