वेदाविनाशिनं नित्यं य एनमजमव्ययम्।कथं स पुरुषः पार्थ कं घातयति हन्ति कम्॥
vedāvināśinaṃ nityaṃ ya enam ajam avyayamkathaṃ sa puruṣaḥ pārtha kaṃ ghātayati hanti kam
Word by word
The verse says
If you know this as indestructible, unending, unborn, unchanging — then whom could you possibly kill, Arjuna, and whom could you cause to be killed?
In plain words
Krishna turns the argument into a question and hands it back.
If you actually know what a person is, who is left for you to kill?
Notice he covers both roles. Not only the one who strikes, but the one who causes the striking. Arjuna cannot get out of this by having someone else fire the arrow.
Where you've felt this · at work
You worry for weeks about being the one to deliver a decision. Then it turns out the decision was made months earlier, by no one in the room. Your part was real. It was just never the part you were losing sleep over.
Going deeper
The two verbs are doing careful work. Hanti is kills. Ghātayati is causes to be killed.
Arjuna's entire Chapter 1 case rested on authorship — the guilt would be his, the hand would be his. This verse closes both exits at once. If the premise holds, neither direct action nor arranging it makes you the author of an ending that cannot happen.
But look at the first word: veda — knows. The whole sentence is conditional. Krishna is not saying nobody kills. He is saying that for someone who genuinely sees this, the question dissolves.
That conditional is honest, and it matters. Arjuna does not know this yet. He has been told it, which is a different thing — as verse 29 will say outright.
So this verse is not the end of the argument. It is a description of where the argument leads, shown to a man who is not standing there yet.