पञ्चैतानि महाबाहो कारणानि निबोध मे।सांख्ये कृतान्ते प्रोक्तानि सिद्धये सर्वकर्मणाम्॥
pañcaitāni mahā-bāho kāraṇāni nibodha mesānkhye kṛtānte proktāni siddhaye sarva-karmaṇām
Word by word
The verse says
Learn from me the five causes, mighty-armed one, that the reckoning of things says must come together for any action to be completed.
In plain words
He changes gear and starts counting.
Five things have to come together before any action happens at all. Not one cause. Five.
And the number is the point. Everything that follows about blame, credit and the ego of the doer rests on the arithmetic he is about to do.
Where you've felt this · in community
A train leaves on time. The driver turned up, the track was clear, the signals worked, somebody cleaned the carriages the night before, and the weather held. You notice none of this. If any one of the five had failed you would have noticed only the failure, and you would have blamed one person for it.
Going deeper
Counting the causes before discussing responsibility is a deliberate order, and it decides everything that comes after.
The ordinary way we assign credit and blame assumes a single cause: somebody did it. That assumption is built into how we speak, how we praise and how we punish. It is also, as a description of how anything actually happens, false.
By putting five causes on the table first, the ground is laid for the uncomfortable claim a few verses on: that a person who thinks of himself as the sole doer of his actions has his arithmetic wrong.
This is not yet an argument about free will. It is a smaller and more checkable claim. Think of the last thing you are proud of, and count how many things had to hold steady for it to come off. The number is never one.