The Lord, the Self, does not, of itself, create doership: it does not bid one act. Nor does it create the actions, the most-desired things of the world, chariots, pots, palaces and the rest. Nor does it create the joining of one who has made a chariot and the rest with the fruit of that action. If the embodied one does nothing whatever of itself and causes nothing to be done, then who, acting and causing to act, engages in activity? It is one's own nature, one's own being, the Nature marked by ignorance, the māyā, that engages, the māyā which He will speak of as 'for this divine māyā of Mine' and the rest. But in the highest truth.

For this world, which goes about in the form of god, animal, man, and unmoving thing through its contact with matter, this lord, the self abiding in its natural form and not in the sway of action, does not create, does not bring into being, the agency peculiar to a god and the rest, the actions peculiar to this and that being, and the connection with the fruit, the state of god and the rest, that those actions give. What then? Nature goes about. 'Nature' is the impress of matter; this agency and the rest, of such a kind, is made by the impress made by the conceit of self toward this and that being, a conceit made by the contact with the matter that has taken the form of god and the rest, born of the earlier and earlier action set going from beginningless time; it is not prompted by the self's own essential nature. This is the meaning.

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

Nor does the living being really act, Krishna says, with 'not agency'. For the living being is a master only with respect to insentient things.