Sāṅkhya Yoga

The chapter opens with Arjuna's collapse still in progress. He asks, in 2.7, to be taught rather than consoled, and that request converts the scene from a lament into an instruction. Kṛṣṇa's first move is deliberately cold: grief for the dead is misplaced because the embodied self is not what is destroyed. Verses 11 to 30 make this case from several angles — the self passes through bodies as through the stages of a life, it is unborn and unkillable, and even on the opposing view that it perishes with the body, grief still changes nothing.

From 2.31 the argument switches register from metaphysics to duty. Arjuna is a kṣatriya; a lawful war is a door standing open, and refusing it earns not virtue but disgrace, which for a warrior is worse than death. This is the Gītā's most uncomfortable passage, and the text does not soften it.

The third movement, from 2.39, introduces the term the chapter is named for. Having given the analysis (sāṅkhya), Kṛṣṇa now gives the discipline (yoga): act, but relinquish the fruit. Verse 2.47 states it in the form everyone quotes. What follows is the chapter's real innovation — a definition of skill in action as evenness of mind, and then, from 2.54, a long portrait of the sthitaprajña, the one whose insight is steady, drawn through the withdrawal of the senses and closing on the tortoise simile and the image of rivers entering an unmoved sea.