अपि चेदसि पापेभ्यः सर्वेभ्यः पापकृत्तमः।सर्वं ज्ञानप्लवेनैव वृजिनं सन्तरिष्यसि॥
api ced asi pāpebhyaḥ sarvebhyaḥ pāpa-kṛt-tamaḥsarvaṃ jñāna-plavenaiva vṛjinaṃ santariṣyasi
Word by word
The verse says
Even if you were the worst of all who have done harm, you would cross over everything crooked in the boat of knowing.
In plain words
One of the most generous sentences in the book.
Pāpa-kṛt-tamaḥ — the most harm-doing of all. The superlative. Not even if you have made mistakes. The worst there is.
And the image: jñāna-plavena — by the boat of knowing. You do not have to be worthy of the boat. You have to get in it.
Where you've felt this · in failure
Someone with twenty years behind them they cannot look at directly. They are told, and it takes a long time to land, that the twenty years are not the ticket price.
Going deeper
The verse is aimed at a specific despair, and it is worth naming it.
The despair is arithmetic: I have done too much for this to be available to me. It is common, it feels like honesty, and the Gita refuses it in one line.
Vṛjinam — the crooked, the twisted. And santariṣyasi — you will cross completely over. The image is of water and a boat, not of a ledger being cleared.
That image is doing the theological work. A ledger has to be balanced; a river only has to be crossed. Nothing is being cancelled. Something is being left on the far bank.
And it sits directly after the verse about seeing all beings in yourself, which is not accidental. A person who sees that does not need to be told they are forgiven. The category has stopped applying.
The next verse explains the mechanism, and it is the most physical image in the chapter.