विहाय कामान्यः सर्वान्पुमांश्चरति निःस्पृहः।निर्ममो निरहंकारः स शांतिमधिगच्छति॥
vihāya kāmān yaḥ sarvān pumānś carati niḥspṛhaḥnirmamo nirahankāraḥ sa śāntim adhigacchati
Word by word
The verse says
The person who gives up wanting and goes about without craving, without "mine", without "I am the one" — that person comes to peace.
In plain words
Three things dropped, and the last two are the deep ones.
Niḥspṛha — no craving. Nirmama — no mine. Nirahaṅkāra — no I am the one doing this.
That middle word is the one that answers Chapter 1.
Where you've felt this · in creative work
You hand over a project you built and watch someone else change it. There is a version of you that would have found that unbearable. You notice, mildly, that you have no stake in it any more.
Going deeper
Nirmama — without mine. Trace that back to where this book started.
Dhritarashtra's very first word in Chapter 1 was māmakāḥ — my men — and it split one family into two armies. Duryodhana said mama sainyasya, my army. Arjuna collapsed over sva-janam, my own people. The entire first chapter runs on possessive pronouns.
So when Krishna names nirmama as a condition of peace, he is not introducing a new idea at the end of a chapter. He is closing a circuit that was opened in the book's opening line.
Nirahaṅkāra — without the I-maker. Ahaṅkāra is literally the I-doing faculty, the thing that stamps ownership onto an action. This is what was crushing Arjuna: not the deaths, but being the one whose hand it was.
And notice that the verse keeps the person moving. Carati — he goes about, he lives. Nothing here describes withdrawal from life. What has been removed is not activity but the apparatus that claims it.