व्यवसायात्मिका बुद्धिरेकेह कुरुनन्दन।बहुशाखा ह्यनन्ताश्च बुद्धयोऽव्यवसायिनाम्॥
vyavasāyātmikā buddhir ekeha kuru-nandanabahu-śākhā hyanantāś ca buddhayo ’vyavasāyinām
Word by word
The verse says
On this path the mind that has settled is one thing, and it points one way. The minds of people who have not settled branch endlessly.
In plain words
One direction, or a thousand.
A mind that has decided is single. A mind that has not is bahu-śākhāḥ — many-branched — and the branches never stop.
Anyone who has lain awake going round a decision knows which one they were.
Where you've felt this · in study
You cannot decide, so you keep finding new things to weigh. Each one feels like diligence. None of them settles anything, and by midnight there are more of them than when you started.
Going deeper
Vyavasāyātmikā buddhiḥ — a mind whose nature is resolve. It is worth sitting with, because it is not what English usually means by decisiveness.
This is not being quick to choose, or stubborn once chosen. It is a mind that has stopped being pulled in several directions at once because it knows what it is for.
The contrast is precise. Branching is not presented as a failure of intelligence. Clever people branch beautifully; that is often the problem. What multiplies the branches is not stupidity but craving — each desire generates its own line of reasoning, and they do not resolve into one another.
So the endlessness is diagnostic. If the considerations keep breeding, something upstream has not been settled.
And this is exactly Arjuna's condition in Chapter 1. His arguments got more detailed and more numerous the longer he spoke, and by verse 44 he was quoting. That was not a man reasoning toward an answer. That was branching.