क्रोधाद्भवति संमोहः संमोहात्स्मृतिविभ्रमः।स्मृतिभ्रंशाद् बुद्धिनाशो बुद्धिनाशात्प्रणश्यति॥
krodhād bhavati sammohaḥ sammohāt smṛti-vibhramaḥsmṛti-bhranśād buddhi-nāśo buddhi-nāśāt praṇaśyati
Word by word
The verse says
From anger comes confusion. From confusion, memory fails. When memory goes, the understanding goes with it — and once that is gone, the person is lost.
In plain words
The chain continues, and the last three steps are fast.
Anger clouds things. Clouded, you lose your memory. Lose that and judgement goes. And then: praṇaśyati — he is destroyed.
Six steps from idly thinking about something to ruin.
Where you've felt this · in relationships
You say the thing you had promised yourself you would never say. Afterwards you can remember deciding not to say it. In the moment, that decision was simply not in the room with you.
Going deeper
Smṛti-vibhrama — the failure of memory — is the step people skip, and it is the most interesting one.
It does not mean forgetting facts. It means losing access to what you already know: your own commitments, who this person is to you, what you decided when you were thinking clearly. All of it stays true and none of it is available.
That is why anger feels like clarity from the inside. The competing considerations have not been defeated. They have gone offline.
Then buddhi-nāśa, the destruction of the discerning faculty — the same buddhi the whole chapter has been building up since verse 39. Krishna spent twenty verses describing a settled mind, and here he shows the mechanism that dismantles it.
The chain is worth reading in both directions. Forwards it explains how a reasonable person ends up ruined. Backwards it tells you where the leverage is, and the answer is uncomfortable: not at anger, and not at desire, but much further back, at what you let your attention rest on.