He who has a body is the embodied one (dehin). For that embodied Self, in this present body, there are childhood, youth and old age, three states distinct from one another: childhood the state of a child, youth the middle state, old age the worn state, the decline of years. When the first state perishes the Self does not perish, and when the second arises the Self does not arise; it is the changeless Self itself that is seen to come to the second and third states. In just the same way the gaining of another body belongs to the changeless Self. The wise man, the man of understanding, is therefore not deluded by this. Although delusion caused by the destruction of the Self cannot arise in one who knows the Self is eternal, a worldly delusion is still seen, caused by contact with cold and heat, pleasure and pain: delusion at separation from pleasure, sorrow at union with pain. Anticipating this objection of Arjuna's, the Blessed Lord says.

Just as, for the self present in a single body, when boyhood is left behind and youth and the further states are reached, a discerning person, holding the self to be stable, does not grieve thinking 'the self is destroyed', so too, when the self passes from one body to another, the discerning person, knowing the self to be just as stable, does not grieve. Since the selves are eternal, they are no occasion for grief. This much, then, is what is to be done here: the selves, though eternal, are by beginningless karma made subject to it and so touched by bodies fitting to this or that karma; and those who, with those very bodies, in order to be freed of bondage, perform the scripturally ordained action, war and the rest, suited to their own class and done with no eye to its fruit, must, since it cannot be avoided, bear the contacts of the senses with their objects, which, through cold, heat, and the like, bring pleasure and pain; and these are to be endured until the scriptural action is completed. This very point the next verse makes.

An objection: transmigration holds good only if there is an embodied self, and the very existence of such a self is unproven. Not so, for the verse says 'in this body' (dehinah asmin). Just as the embodied one persists through the changes of body, childhood and the rest, since it is established as the seer of those states, so it persists when another body is reached, for it remains the seer there too. An insentient body cannot itself have the experience of childhood and so on, since once dead it is seen to experience nothing; the dead body lacks experience because the vital airs and the rest have departed from it. Suppose someone argues that the self is proved simply by the experience 'I am a man' and the like. That fails, for in deep sleep, when the body is just the same as in waking, no such particular cognitions are seen; and the conceit lodged in the mind is then uniform, like the bare awareness in a log of wood. Scripture too establishes this. Its authority stands on a par with perception and the other means of knowledge, and it is unlike the scriptures of the Buddhists and others, because it is authorless. In what is authorless, the faults of a human author, ignorance and the rest, cannot be supposed; and without some sentence being authorless, no establishing of dharma and the rest, acknowledged by every system, is possible. Anyone who grants neither an authoritative means nor an authorless text is no upholder of a system at all, since his position settles nothing. One might say, 'let there simply be no dharma, since it can be defined away'. Not so, for what every system accepts cannot be denied without a means of knowledge. One might say, 'but there is no establishing of what has no proof'. Not so, for the acceptance of all is itself a proof; otherwise no verbal dealing of any kind could be established. Nor can you yourself know 'this was heard by me'; were the text authored, there would be a rejoinder to it, or a delusion in you, or it would be the cause of every sorrow, or the single text would turn out otherwise. And if the proof of dharma were composed, the suspicion of the author's faults, ignorance and the rest, would arise, and freedom from fault is not established by a text's own word. Nor is the bare assertion by just anybody that something is authorless on a par with the Veda's uttered word, for the Veda is established as received from beginningless time. Therefore the Veda has authority, and therefore the steady one is not deluded about it by sophistical reasonings. Or else: grief looks either to the destruction of the soul or to the destruction of the body. It is not for the destruction of the soul, since the soul is eternal, which is why Krishna says 'never indeed'; nor is it for the destruction of the body, which is why He says 'of the embodied one'. Just as there is no grief when, the body of childhood being lost, old age and the rest are reached, so there should be none when, a worn-out body being lost, another body is reached.