अक्षरं ब्रह्म परमं स्वभावोऽध्यात्ममुच्यते।भूतभावोद्भवकरो विसर्गः कर्मसंज्ञितः॥
akṣaraṃ brahma paramaṃ svabhāvo ’dhyātmam ucyatebhūta-bhāvodbhava-karo visargaḥ karma-sanjñitaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Krishna said: The imperishable, the highest, is Brahman. Its own being, in each person, is called the self. And the sending-forth that brings beings into existence is called action.
In plain words
Three answers, packed tight.
The third is the surprise. Karma here is not chores or duty or the punishments of a past life.
It is the outflow that brings living things into being at all — creation, in the smallest sense as well as the largest.
Where you've felt this · in family life
Your uncle is planting a row of saplings along the lane behind the house. He is seventy-one. He is not going to sit in that shade, and everyone knows it, including him. He does it because his own father planted a different lane sixty years ago, and that is the shade he grew up under.
Going deeper
Karma gets defined here in a way that bears almost no resemblance to how the word is used in ordinary speech.
Not reward, not punishment, not a ledger. Visarga — a sending forth, a release, a letting go of something that then has a life of its own. Action, in this book, is the mechanism by which anything at all comes into existence and keeps going.
That reframes every instruction about action in the previous chapters. When Krishna says to act without leaning on the fruit, he is not talking about task management. He is talking about how you participate in the thing that makes beings.
For a reader it lifts the weight off the word. Your work is not an account being settled. It is a sending forth, and what comes of it will outlast your view of it, which is exactly why holding on to the outcome was never going to work.