तत्क्षेत्रं यच्च यादृक्च यद्विकारि यतश्च यत् ।स च यो यत्प्रभावश्च तत्समासेन मे शृणु॥
tat kṣetraṃ yac ca yādṛk ca yad-vikāri yataś ca yatsa ca yo yat-prabhāvaś ca tat samāsena me śṛṇu
Word by word
The verse says
What that field is, what it is like, how it changes, and where it comes from; and who he is, and what his powers are — hear that from me, in brief.
In plain words
Six questions, listed in order, and then answered in order over the next fifteen verses.
This is a contents page.
Samāsena — in brief. He says it twice in this chapter, which is a warning that the summary will still be dense.
Where you've felt this · at work
A surveyor who walks a site before writing anything tells you what she is going to cover — boundaries, drainage, what the soil is like, what was here before. The list takes thirty seconds. It is the reason the forty pages afterwards make sense.
Going deeper
Announcing the structure before giving the content is unusual in this book, and it is a sign of how difficult what follows is.
Most chapters move by association — a question, an answer, an image, a return to something from four chapters back. This one sets out six headings and then works through them. That change of method is itself information: the material here does not yield to the usual approach.
It is also the chapter where the Gita comes closest to the philosophical schools it grew up among, and the vocabulary shows it.
For a reader the practical advice is to let the list do its job. The next few verses are a catalogue and will feel like one. They are the ground the second half of the chapter stands on, and the second half is where the chapter stops being technical and becomes something else entirely.