सुखदुःखे समे कृत्वा लाभालाभौ जयाजयौ।ततो युद्धाय युज्यस्व नैवं पापमवाप्स्यसि॥
sukha-duḥkhe same kṛtvā lābhālābhau jayājayautato yuddhāya yujyasva naivaṃ pāpam avāpsyasi
Word by word
The verse says
Treat pleasure and pain as the same. Treat gain and loss, victory and defeat, as the same. Then get ready and fight. You will take on no fault that way.
In plain words
Here is the turn. Everything before this was about outcomes. This verse cancels them.
Pleasure and pain, the same. Gain and loss, the same. Winning and losing, the same.
Then fight. Not because it will go well. Because the going-well has stopped being the reason.
Where you've felt this · in creative work
You stop checking whether the thing is working and simply do the next part of it well. The strange result is that you do it better. The attention that was going into monitoring comes back to the task.
Going deeper
This is the first statement of the Gita's actual answer, and 2.47 is its full form.
Look at what it undoes. Krishna has just spent seven verses arguing from consequences — heaven, earth, honour, disgrace. Now he says: hold all of those as equal, and then act.
Why is that not a contradiction? Because the earlier verses were aimed at getting Arjuna up, and this one is aimed at how he stands once he is.
The word is samam — the same, level. It appears in 2.15 and will keep appearing. It does not mean not caring. It means these pairs have stopped being the thing your action is for.
And the promise at the end answers the question that has haunted Arjuna since Chapter 1: na evaṃ pāpam avāpsyasi — that way, you take on no fault.
That is remarkable if you follow it. The same act — the same arrows, the same deaths — carries fault or does not, depending on where the person doing it is standing. The Gita's ethics run through motive, not through outcome. This is the verse where that becomes visible.