All the undertakings, all the actions undertaken, of one who sees as described are free of desire and of the resolves that cause it: undertaken without desire and without the resolves born of desire, they are carried out as mere bare activity, for the holding-together of the world if he is one engaged, for the mere maintenance of life if he is one withdrawn. Him the knowers of Brahman call, in the highest truth, the learned one, the one whose actions have been burnt up by the fire of knowledge: the seeing of inaction and the rest in action and the rest is knowledge, and that very knowledge is the fire by which his actions, marked as good and bad, have been burnt up. One who sees inaction and the rest becomes, by that very seeing, actionless, a renouncer whose activity is only for the bare maintenance of life; he does not engage in action, even though, before discernment, he had engaged in it. But one who, having begun his action, afterward comes to the right vision of the Self, seeing no purpose in any action, gives up action together with its means. And if, for some reason, the giving-up of action is not possible and he engages in action as before, for the holding-together of the world, being free of attachment to the action and to its fruit since he has no purpose of his own, even so he does nothing whatever, for his actions have been burnt up by the fire of knowledge and his action becomes mere inaction. To show this the Blessed Lord says the following.

The seeker of liberation, all of whose undertakings of action, the obligatory, the occasional, and the desire-prompted, preceded by worldly actions such as the gaining of substances, are free of desire, free of attachment to fruit, and free of resolve. 'Resolve' is the dwelling that makes the self one with matter and its qualities; being joined with the dwelling on the self's own nature as set apart from matter, his undertakings are free of that resolve. Such a man, doing action thus, the knowers of truth call wise, one whose earlier karma has been burned by the fire of the knowledge of the truth of the self that is included within action. So action does have the form of knowledge. The Lord unfolds this.

This is a brief sub-gloss. For a fuller reading of this verse, see Madhusūdana, Śaṅkara, or Rāmānuja above.

Krishna unfolds this very point with five verses beginning 'whose'. He speaks of one whose actions are burnt up by the fire of knowledge, in the manner described.