The man whom these, cold and heat as described, do not trouble, do not shake, the man for whom pleasure and pain are equal, who is free of joy and dejection when pleasure or pain comes, the wise man, by his vision of the eternal Self: he, steadfast in the vision of the eternal Self's true nature and able to bear the pairs of opposites, is fit, is capable, for deathlessness, for the state of the deathless, that is, for liberation. And here is why it is right to endure cold, heat and the rest without sorrow and delusion.

The man, joined with steadiness, who counts unavoidable pain as he counts pleasure, and performs the action suited to his own class, war and the rest, done with no eye to its fruit, as a means to immortality, and whom the contacts found within that action, the soft and the cruel touches of falling weapons and the like, do not trouble, he alone wins immortality, not one like you who cannot bear pain. So, since the selves are eternal, this much is what is to be done here. What was said, that the eternality of the selves and the natural perishability of the bodies are no occasion for grief, in 'the wise do not grieve for the dead or the living', the Lord now begins to establish.

Krishna then states the purpose, with 'the man whom these do not afflict'. He means the man whom these sense-contacts do not afflict. The word 'man' (purusha) is used as a qualifier, because in the absence of connection with a body no one is afflicted at all; the term marks out one who lies within the body. How is such a man not afflicted? By being even-minded toward pain and pleasure. And how does he become so? By steadiness.