कर्मजं बुद्धियुक्ता हि फलं त्यक्त्वा मनीषिणः।जन्मबन्धविनिर्मुक्ताः पदं गच्छन्त्यनामयम्॥
karma-jaṃ buddhi-yuktā hi phalaṃ tyaktvā manīṣiṇaḥjanma-bandha-vinirmuktāḥ padaṃ gacchanty-anāmayam
Word by word
The verse says
Thoughtful people joined to that mind give up what their actions would have earned them. Released from the hold of birth, they reach a place where nothing hurts.
In plain words
The reward for letting go of rewards.
They give up the fruit. What they get instead is anāmayam — a place with no sickness in it, nothing that ails.
It is a quiet word for a large promise.
Where you've felt this · in friendship
You stop keeping score in a friendship. Not out of virtue — you just notice one day that you have not been counting. The friendship does not become grander. It stops having a low hum underneath it.
Going deeper
Anāmaya is a medical word. It means free of disease, unafflicted, and its ordinary use is about bodies.
The Gita uses it here for the state reached by giving up the fruits of action, and the choice is deliberate. The condition being escaped is treated as an illness rather than a sin — something that afflicts you, not something you are blamed for.
That reframing runs through the whole book. Craving is not wickedness; it is a disorder of attention. Krishna is less like a judge than like a physician, which is also why his tone can be so blunt without being cruel.
Janma-bandha — the bond of birth. In this cosmology, action taken for its fruit produces a result that must be collected, and collecting it requires another life. Stop generating the fruit and the mechanism has nothing to work with.
A reader who does not hold the rebirth framework can still take the structure. Wanting outcomes commits you to futures. Stop, and you get this afternoon back.