यस्य नाहंकृतो भावो बुद्धिर्यस्य न लिप्यते।हत्वापि स इमाँल्लोकान्न हन्ति न निबध्यते॥
yasya nāhankṛto bhāvo buddhir yasya na lipyatehatvā ‘pi sa imāl lokān na hanti na nibadhyate
Word by word
The verse says
The one whose nature is free of the sense of being the doer, whose understanding is not smeared by it: even if he kills these people, he does not kill, and he is not bound.
In plain words
This is the hardest verse in the chapter and it should not be read quickly.
Taken out of its setting it sounds like permission. It is not, and the chapter's own argument is what stops it being so.
Two conditions are stacked before the claim, and they are not conditions anyone can award themselves. No sense of doership at all. An understanding with nothing stuck to it.
Where you've felt this · in study
A surgeon cuts someone open. The same act performed by anybody else in any other room is the most serious crime there is. What makes the difference is not how the surgeon feels about it. It is the entire structure around the act: the training, the consent, the purpose, the review afterwards. Remove any one of those and the feeling does not save it.
Going deeper
This verse has been quoted to excuse violence, and the honest thing is to say so and then show why it does not do that work.
The argument fails on its own terms. Anybody reaching for it is reaching for something, which is precisely the grip the verse excludes. A person genuinely without the sense of being the doer is not available to be persuaded that this licenses him, because there is no him in the sense required. The verse describes a condition; it does not hand out a permit.
There is a second guard inside the chapter. Right and wrong actions were given the same five causes two verses ago, which means nothing here reclassifies a wrong act as a right one. The deed is not being made good. A claim is being made about binding, which is a different question.
And the setting matters. This is said to a soldier in a lawful army on a field he did not choose, about a duty 18.7 has already said he may not abandon out of confusion. It is not addressed to anyone choosing whether to harm someone. For a reader, the usable part is narrow and real: the ego of the doer is what makes action stick to you, and nothing in that sentence is about hurting people.