ऊर्ध्वमूलमधःशाखमश्वत्थं प्राहुरव्ययम्।छन्दांसि यस्य पर्णानि यस्तं वेद स वेदवित्॥
ūrdhva-mūlam adhaḥ-śākham aśvatthaṃ prāhur avyayamchandānsi yasya parṇāni yas taṃ veda sa veda-vit
Word by word
The verse says
They speak of an unfading fig tree with its roots above and its branches below, and the hymns are its leaves. Whoever knows that tree knows the Veda.
In plain words
Krishna starts with a picture, and he turns it upside down on purpose.
The world is a tree. But its root is not in the ground. The root is above - out of sight, in whatever all of this comes out of. What you can see is branches.
So the part of the world you can touch is the far end of something. Never the start of it.
Where you've felt this · at work
Your friend Deepak opened a small restaurant two years ago and it is always full. You assume it is the food, or the low prices, or the corner it sits on. Then he mentions that his mother cooks the base of every curry at home each morning and sends it across in a steel pot. The thing you could see was never the reason it worked. The reason was somewhere you had not thought to look.
Going deeper
An upside-down tree is not a riddle. It is a claim about where causes live.
A normal tree tells you where it came from. Follow the trunk down and you find the root. This one cannot be followed that way. Its root is ūrdhva - above, meaning earlier, meaning the source the whole visible thing hangs from. Everything you can point at in your life is a branch.
The leaves are called the hymns, and that detail is sharp. Leaves are what make a tree look alive and worth keeping. Even religion, done for what it pays out, is part of the growth rather than the way out of it.
What changes for you is small and useful. When something goes wrong, you look along the branch for the cause, and it is usually not there. The cause sits further back than the place where the trouble showed up.