---
title: "Neither I, Nor Anyone"
sousTitre: "The Bhagavad-Gītā removes the agent from the senses moving among their objects; the Dhammapada removes even the witness one thought to find behind them."
description: "Krishna teaches that it is not 'I' who acts, only the senses among their objects. The Dhammapada goes further: there is no one to remove."
date: 2026-07-07
lang: en
tradition: vedanta
auteurs: ["Bhagavad-Gītā", "Buddha (attrib.)"]
---
# Neither I, Nor Anyone

A fruit falls, rolls to the edge of the table—and the hand has already closed around it before any decision has had time to form. We say: I reacted quickly. Krishna, in the fifth chapter of the Gītā, goes further and removes even the "I."

> "It is not I who act": let the Yogī who knows the truth think thus when seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, walking, sleeping, breathing, speaking, letting go or taking hold, opening or closing the eyes; and let him say to himself: "The senses are made for their objects."
>
> — **Bhagavad-Gītā**, *Bhagavad-Gītā*, livre Chapter V, § 8-9. éd. after the French translation by Émile Burnouf, Librairie de l'Institut, 1861.

There is nothing mystical in the enumeration: seeing, hearing, walking, sleeping, breathing—the most ordinary acts of the day, those we never thought to claim because they go without saying. It is precisely there that the withdrawal takes hold. The Yogī does not say this of great decisions; he says it of breathing. And the reason he gives is no sleight of hand: the senses are *made for* their objects, just as the eye is made for color. A meeting between two natures occurs; no one need sign it.

Elsewhere, the Gītā teaches to [renounce the fruit of action](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-05-agir-lacher-le-fruit/)—but this lesson precedes and founds it. It is not yet a matter of letting go of what action yields; it is a matter of seeing that no "I" ever performed it. Chapter XIV names what, in reality, stirs in place of this self:

> Truth, impulse, darkness—such are the modes born of nature, which bind the unchanging soul to the body.
>
> — **Bhagavad-Gītā**, *Bhagavad-Gītā*, livre Chapter XIV, § 5. éd. after the French translation by Émile Burnouf, Librairie de l'Institut, 1861.

*[guṇa]* The three *guṇa*—literally "strands"—are the impersonal modes that weave matter: clarity, dynamism, inertia. See [*guṇa*](https://viasophia.org/lexique/guna/).

The *guṇa* act upon the *guṇa*: the hand that closes, the eye that turns toward movement, belong to this mechanics of nature (*prakṛti*), not to the soul they ensnare by making it believe they are its own. And this soul, the Gītā does not make it vanish—it displaces it. Chapter II had already named it: a Soul that "neither arrows pierce nor flame burns," unchanging, a witness. What the Yogī removes from the gesture is not a subject—it is an usurper. Beneath the usurpation, a [witness](https://viasophia.org/lexique/atman/) remains, motionless, who does nothing and to whom, for that very reason, nothing can be taken.

## What Does "It Is Not I Who Acts" Mean in the Bhagavad-Gītā?

Krishna teaches that seeing, walking, or breathing are not acts of the Self but of the senses encountering their objects, according to the three *guṇa* of nature. The Self (Ātman) never acts; it witnesses, unchanging, what nature accomplishes in its name.

The Dhammapada, on this same ground, does not stop where the Gītā stops. It begins with the same two steps—the impermanence of all that is composite, the suffering that clings to it—then pushes negation to its limit:

> All forms are without substantial reality. When one is deeply penetrated by this fact, one is freed from suffering. This is the path of purification.
>
> — **trad. attributed to Buddha**, *Dhammapada*, livre Chapter XX (The Way), § 279. éd. after the French translation by Fernand Hû, Ernest Leroux, 1878.

The word Fernand Hû renders as "without substantial reality" is *anattā*: not-self. And here the distinction with the Gītā must be kept sharp, lest the two texts blur into a vague "letting go" that says nothing precise. The Gītā removes an usurper to uncover a real witness, the Soul that nothing can mar. The Dhammapada removes *all forms*, without declared exception—and verse 279 comes immediately after the twin verses on impermanence and suffering, as their broadest extension: what holds for aggregates holds for everything. No hidden witness is exempt from dissolution. To seek, behind the senses that stir, a permanent spectator who, unlike them, does not move—is still to seek a form, and to form it in thought is already to lend it the substance one has just denied.

Two negations, then, that do not reach the same depth: one displaces the self toward a more stable rock; the other denies there is any rock to be found, even stable, even inward. The Buddhist [not-self](https://viasophia.org/lexique/anatta/) refutes not only the ego that says "I act"—it refutes even the sage who would say "I watch acting."

And yet the two teachings converge on what they undo in the present moment, that of the hand closing around the fruit. Whether one discovers, beneath the gesture, an eternal witness or discovers no one at all, the immediate consequence is the same: the hand no longer bears a signature. He who thinks "it is I who grasped" tightens a chain that the Gītā says is woven of *guṇa* and the Dhammapada says is woven of nothing. To free oneself from this chain does not require choosing between the two metaphysics—India, in any case, never let them blur, one affirming beneath multiplicity a Self identical to Brahman, the other denying it term by term. What the two texts loosen together, each at its own depth, is the same hand clenched around what it has just done.

The fruit, in both cases, falls and lets itself be taken. What changes is not the gesture—it is that it no longer needs someone to claim it.

## Sources

- Bhagavad-Gîtâ, *Bhagavad-Gîtâ* — Librairie de l'Institut, 1861, trans. Émile Burnouf (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Bhagavad-G%C3%AEt%C3%A2)
- trad. attribuée à Bouddha, *Dhammapada* — Ernest Leroux, 1878, trans. Fernand Hû (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Dhammapada)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/articles/2026-07-07-ni-moi-ni-personne/