Renouncing, relinquishing, all actions, the constant, the occasional, the desire-prompted and the forbidden, renouncing them all by the mind, by the discerning understanding, through the seeing of inaction in action and the rest, he sits at ease. With the activity of speech, mind and body given up, free of strain, his mind serene, with all outward purposes turned away apart from the Self, he is said to sit at ease. He is in control, his senses conquered. Where, and how, does he sit? In the city of nine gates: the seven openings in the head are the doors of the Self's perceiving, and the two lower ones serve for the discharge of urine and excrement; by these doors the body is called the city of nine gates. It is like a city, having the Self alone for its one master, and peopled, as a city by its citizens, by the senses, mind, intellect and objects that work for the Self's ends and produce the manifold cognition of fruits. In that city of nine gates the embodied one, having renounced all action, sits. Why the qualification? Every embodied one, renouncer or not, sits in the body itself, so the qualification would seem purposeless. The answer: the ignorant embodied one, who sees the Self as the mere aggregate of body and senses, thinks 'I sit in the house', on the ground or on a seat. For one who sees the Self as the mere body, the cognition 'I sit in the body, as in a house' is not possible; that cognition is possible only for one who sees the Self as distinct from the aggregate of body and the rest. And the renunciation, by the mind, by discerning knowledge, of the actions of another, the actions superimposed by ignorance upon the Self which is other than they, is possible only through knowledge. Even for one in whom discerning knowledge has arisen and who has renounced all action, the sitting is in the body itself, as in a house, since, by the persistence of the residue of impressions of the action whose fruit has already begun, particular cognitions still arise in the body. So 'he sits in the body itself' does carry the force of a meaningful qualification, since it bears on the difference between the cognition of the knower and that of the ignorant. Though it has been said that he sits having renounced the actions of effect and instrument superimposed by ignorance upon the Self, one might suspect that doership and the causing-of-a-doer inhere in the Self itself, and so He says: not himself acting, and not causing the effect and the instruments to act. Is it that the doership and causing-of-a-doer of the embodied one, inhering in his own Self, do not arise because of renunciation, as the going of one who walks ceases when he gives up the act of walking? Or is it that the Self has of itself no doership and no causing-of-a-doer at all? The answer: the Self has, of itself, no doership and no causing-of-a-doer. For it has been said 'this is called unmodifiable' (Gītā 2.25), 'though seated in the body, He does not act and is not stained' (Gītā 13.31), and the scripture 'as it were He thinks, as it were He moves' (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 4.3.7). Further.

This agency of the actions, prompted by the connection with the body that is rooted in the self's earlier karma, does not belong to the self by its own essential nature; with a mind that has this discernment for its object, renouncing all actions in the city of nine gates, the man of restraint, the embodied one, making no effort to govern the body and not at all causing the body to act, abides happily. The Lord states directly the natural form of the self.

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

Krishna again makes the meaning of the word 'renunciation' clear, with 'all actions'. By the qualifier 'with the mind' is meant the giving up of the false sense of agency.