निर्मानमोहा जितसङ्गदोषा अध्यात्मनित्या विनिवृत्तकामाः।द्वन्द्वैर्विमुक्ताः सुखदुःखसंज्ञै र्गच्छन्त्यमूढाः पदमव्ययं तत्॥
nirmāna-mohā jita-saṅga-doṣāadhyātma-nityā vinivṛtta-kāmāḥdvandvair vimuktāḥ sukha-duḥkha-sanjñairgacchanty amūḍhāḥ padam avyayaṃ tat
Word by word
The verse says
Free of pride and confusion, with the fault of clinging beaten, settled in the self, their wanting gone quiet, released from the pairs we call pleasure and pain - the unfooled reach that place that does not fade.
In plain words
A list of who gets there, and it is worth reading slowly.
No pride. No confusion. Clinging called what it is - a fault, not a feature. Wanting not crushed, just gone quiet.
Then: released from the pairs. Pleasure and pain arrive as a set, like two sides of one coin. You are not being asked to pick the good side. You are being offered the chance to stop being flipped.
Where you've felt this · in friendship
Your neighbour Kamala stitches clothes at home for people on the street. When a customer praises a blouse she says thank you and puts it in the bag. When one complains about a sleeve she unpicks it and does it again. You have known her eleven years and you could not tell from her face which kind of day she has had. She is not cold. She just does not seem to be riding anything up or down.
Going deeper
Freedom from the pairs is the least understood promise in this book, and it is not what it sounds like.
Dvandva means a matched pair - hot and cold, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. The claim is not that a steady person stops feeling the warm side. It is that the warm side and the cold side come out of the same machine. If a compliment can lift you that far, a complaint can drop you exactly that far. You do not get to keep one and refuse the other.
So what is offered is a trade. You give up the top of the swing and you stop paying for the bottom. That sounds like a loss until you add up what the swing costs you across a year.
And notice the word for the people who arrive: amūḍha, un-fooled. Not holy. Not chosen. Just no longer taken in.