Prakriti in the Bhagavad Gita

Verses across the Gita that speak to prakriti, drawn from all chapters and ordered by where they appear.

• 3.5Inaction is an illusion; nature is already moving you.
• 3.27The doer is imagined; action belongs to nature's forces.
• 3.33Nature drives behavior; force alone cannot overrule it.
• 4.6The unborn can still appear without ceasing to be free.
• 5.14What looks like personal control is nature moving through form.
• 7.4What changes is not the whole of what you are.
• 7.5What sustains the world is subtler than what the senses first show.
• 7.6Everything that appears rises from one source and returns there.
• 7.9The sacred is already inside nature, vitality, and discipline.
• 7.20Desire clouds judgment and sends the mind toward smaller refuges.
• 8.19All formed things return and rise again under nature’s compulsion.
• 9.7What seems like ending is only a return before another beginning.
• 9.8Life unfolds through a power larger than individual will.
• 9.9Action can continue without leaving a chain behind.
• 9.10Change is not chaotic; it unfolds within a higher order.
• 13.1Real knowing starts by separating the seen from the seer.
• 13.20Change belongs to nature; awareness is not caught in it.
• 13.21Action belongs to nature; experience belongs to the one who knows.
• 13.22Attachment to changing qualities keeps the cycle of birth going.
• 13.23Identity is borrowed from the body; the true self stands beyond it.
• 13.24Clear seeing frees you while life still continues.
• 13.30Freedom begins when you stop claiming every action as yours.
• 13.35Clear seeing separates you from what changes and opens the way beyond it.
• 14.3All birth comes from a source beyond personal control.
• 14.4All forms arise from one source, and the divine gives them life.
• 14.5Nature's three forces keep the changeless one identified with the body.
• 14.6Even clarity becomes bondage when you cling to its pleasure.
• 14.7Craving turns action into a chain.
• 14.19Freedom begins when you stop mistaking qualities for a personal doer.
• 15.7What is eternal gets pulled around by what changes.
• 18.40No state is free from the three qualities of nature.