18.66

This is the rhetorical destination of the entire eighteen-chapter poem: abandon all dharmas, come to Me alone for shelter, I will liberate you from all sins, do not grieve. After nine verses (40-48) spent grounding a whole ethics of birth-determined duty, Krishna relativizes all of it beneath a single unconditional act of surrender — dharma turns out to be real and binding, but not final. Later bhakti traditions, Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita and the Gaudiya Vaishnava schools among them, would build an entire theology of prapatti, total self-surrender, on this one verse, and the chapter’s own structure supports that weight: this is the third and final “shelter” (śaraṇam) invocation, after 62 and 65 primed the vocabulary, now arriving as command rather than description. It is arguably the single most theologically consequential line the text contains.