न वेदयज्ञाध्ययनैर्न दानै र्न च क्रियाभिर्न तपोभिरुग्रैः।एवंरूपः शक्य अहं नृलोके द्रष्टुं त्वदन्येन कुरुप्रवीर॥
na veda-yajñādhyayanair na dānairna ca kriyābhir na tapobhir ugraiḥevaṃ-rūpaḥ śakya ahaṃ nṛ-lokedraṣṭuṃ tvad anyena kuru-pravīra
Word by word
The verse says
Not by the Vedas, not by sacrifices, not by study, not by gifts, not by rituals, not by fierce discipline can I be seen in this form in the world of men by anyone but you, great hero of the Kurus.
In plain words
Five methods, listed and ruled out one by one.
Study, sacrifice, charity, ritual, austerity. The entire available programme.
Na... na... na... na... na — five times. None of them reaches this.
Where you've felt this · in study
A friend trains seriously for a year to run a particular race and does everything right. She is not selected, because that year the selection was done by ballot. The training was not wasted and it was also not the thing that decided it, and both of those are true at once.
Going deeper
Ruling out every available method is a strange thing for a religious text to do, and it is done here deliberately.
The list is comprehensive — it covers the whole of what a serious person in that world could undertake. None of it produces this. That is not a criticism of any of those practices; the book recommends several of them elsewhere. It is a statement that this particular thing is not in the category of outcomes that practice produces.
Which is consistent with verse 8, where the eye required had to be given rather than developed.
The honest consequence is uncomfortable and worth sitting with. There is something here that cannot be worked toward. The next verse explains what can be, and it turns out to be the one thing on the list that was never an achievement at all.