This understanding, the knowledge whose object is the discernment of the supreme reality, which directly causes the cessation of the faults, sorrow and delusion, that are the cause of transmigration, has been told to you in Sāṅkhya. Now hear this understanding, about to be stated, in yoga, that is, in the means to attaining that knowledge: in the yoga of action, the practice of action done for the worship of the Lord with the abandonment of attachment and the casting-off of the pairs of opposites, and in the yoga of absorption. He praises that understanding to draw Arjuna toward it: joined with the understanding that bears on yoga, O Pārtha, you will cast off the bondage of action, the bondage that is action itself in the form of merit and demerit, through the attainment of knowledge brought about by the grace of the Lord. And something more.

The understanding (buddhi) is reckoning; the truth of the self, to be ascertained by the understanding, is sankhya. The understanding spoken of for the sake of knowing the truth of the self has been set out from 'never indeed was there a time when I was not' down to 'therefore all beings'. The discipline of understanding now to be told, for the performance of the action that, preceded by knowledge of the self, is the means to liberation, is here meant by the word 'yoga'; for it will be said, 'far inferior is mere action to the discipline of understanding'. Hear, then, this understanding that is to be told in regard to that discipline; joined with which understanding you will cast off the bondage of action, that is, the bondage of transmigration that comes of action. The Lord states the greatness of action joined with the understanding about to be told.

'Sankhya' means knowledge. The Lord's own word, cited in the Vyasa-smriti, says, 'the discernment of the truth of the pure self is what is called sankhya'. 'Yoga' means the means; the Bhagavata uses the word so, 'the yogas have been seen and employed for the securing of men's highest good'. The other two, the Sankhya and Yoga schools, are not here meant as things to be adopted, as is clear from the use of the phrase 'karma-yoga in its entirety' and the like, and from the fact that both of those schools are censured in the Moksha-dharma. After stating their divergence of doctrine, scripture, by its praise of the Pancaratra, shows that since the Vedas have a single aim there is no conflict; the separateness spoken of holds only with respect to the Sankhya school and the rest. In that same Citrasikhandi text, which is rooted in the Pancaratra, oneness with the Veda is declared. In just this way, everywhere, the words 'sankhya' and 'yoga' are to be expounded as denoting what is to be adopted. And by sound reasoning, knowledge belonging to the living being was stated first, while the means is to be stated next. 'Buddhi' is so called because by it one understands; the sense is that the speech by which the matter of sankhya is understood is what has now been declared.