वीतरागभयक्रोधा मन्मया मामुपाश्रिताः।बहवो ज्ञानतपसा पूता मद्भावमागताः॥
vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhā man-mayā mām upāśritāḥbahavo jñāna-tapasā pūtā mad-bhāvam āgatāḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Freed of wanting, fear and anger, filled with me, taking shelter in me, made clean in the fire of knowing - many have come into the way I am.
In plain words
And here is the evidence: many have done this.
The list of what goes is familiar from 2.56 - rāga, bhaya, krodha. Wanting, fear, anger.
And the important word at the end: bahavaḥ - many. Not a rare saint. Many people.
Where you've felt this · in failure
At a meeting about something difficult, you find out that half the people in the room have been through the same thing you have. None of them had mentioned it. It had not occurred to any of them that it was worth saying.
Going deeper
Jñāna-tapasā pūtāḥ - purified by the heat of knowing. Tapas is the word for ascetic practice, and it literally means heat, burning.
The Gita is doing a characteristic thing here. The traditional image is purification through austerity - fasting, exposure, physical discipline. This verse keeps the heat and changes what generates it. Knowing is the fire.
That runs on into 4.19 and 4.37, where the same image gets its fullest statement.
And they have come to my state, my way of being. Not reached me as a destination. Become like this - which is a different and stranger promise than arriving somewhere.
The word carrying the most weight, though, is bahavaḥ. Many. The Gita keeps insisting that what it describes has been done, repeatedly, by people whose names nobody wrote down. For a reader that is more useful than any argument in the chapter.