Sanskrit
नैव किञ्चित्करोमीति युक्तो मन्येत तत्त्ववित् । पश्यन्शृण्वन्स्पृशञ्जिघ्रन्नश्नन्गच्छन्स्वपन्श्वसन् ॥
naiva kiñcit karomīti yukto manyeta tattvavit paśyan śṛṇvan spṛśañ jighrann aśnan gacchan svapan śvasan
Translation
"I do not anything," should think the harmonised one, who knoweth the essence of things; seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
The knower of the essence of things holds, even while performing every ordinary bodily function, the conviction “I do nothing” — a claim that only makes sense given verse 14’s later statement that the true self is never an agent to begin with; the senses and body act on their own among their objects (verse 9 makes this explicit), not the self. The list of eight everyday acts is deliberately mundane: this isn’t a claim about extraordinary states, but about how to regard completely ordinary embodied life.
Concepts