In everyday usage “karma” has drifted to mean something like cosmic bookkeeping — good deeds earn good luck, bad deeds earn bad. That isn’t the sense the word carries in the Bhagavad Gita’s second chapter. There it means simply action, and the chapter’s central practical teaching is about the right relationship to it, not its metaphysical accounting.
Action without attachment to the fruit
The teaching is compressed into BG 2.47: you have standing over the action itself, never over its result. BG 2.48 gives the discipline its technical name — Yoga (योग) — evenness of mind toward success and failure alike, established in which one should act.
This is not a call to indifference or inaction. The Gita is explicit, repeatedly, that withdrawing from action is itself a kind of attachment — to the appearance of renunciation. The discipline is harder than either extreme: act fully, and let go of the anticipated result as your motive for acting.
Related
- Yoga (योग) — the discipline that names this evenness of mind
- Dharma (धर्म) — one’s own duty is the content of right action; karma yoga is the manner of performing it
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Linked from 3 notes
Dharma (धर्म)
One's own duty (svadharma) in the Gita's second chapter — a role-bound, contextual obligation, not a single universal rule for everyone.
Sthitaprajna (स्थितप्रज्ञ)
The "person of steady wisdom" the Gita's second chapter closes with — its technical term for what settled equanimity actually looks like, in mind and action.
Yoga (योग)
In the Gita's second chapter, yoga names a discipline of evenness of mind in action — not a physical practice, and not a single technique — first given this technical sense at BG 2.48.
Referenced in Bhagavad Gita
Related notes
Dharma (धर्म)
One's own duty (svadharma) in the Gita's second chapter — a role-bound, contextual obligation, not a single universal rule for everyone.
Atman (आत्मन्)
The self that inhabits the body in the Gita's second chapter — unborn, imperishable, and untouched by what happens to the body — the metaphysical foundation the chapter's argument for fighting rests on.
Sthitaprajna (स्थितप्रज्ञ)
The "person of steady wisdom" the Gita's second chapter closes with — its technical term for what settled equanimity actually looks like, in mind and action.
Yoga (योग)
In the Gita's second chapter, yoga names a discipline of evenness of mind in action — not a physical practice, and not a single technique — first given this technical sense at BG 2.48.