Bhagavad Gita 2.20 is Chapter 2, Verse 20, in Sankhya Yoga (The Eternal Soul). Below are the Sanskrit text, a transliteration, a plain-English translation and an explanation.
na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṁ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ ajo nityaḥ śāśvato 'yaṁ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre
"The soul is never born, nor does it ever die. It has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. It is unborn, eternal, everlasting, and primeval. It is not killed when the body is killed."
What This Means:
This is one of the most important verses in the Gita. The soul was never born, so it can never die. It doesn't 'begin' at conception or 'end' at death. It is eternal, ancient, and forever. When the body dies, the soul continues, completely unaffected.
Going Deeper:
Six adjectives describe the soul: unborn (aja), eternal (nitya), everlasting (shashvata), primeval (purana), not killed (na hanyate), and beyond becoming (na bhavita). This isn't poetry, it's a precise philosophical statement. The soul exists outside of time and causation.
How To Apply This:
Meditate on this: 'I was never born, and I will never die.' Not your body, that was born and will die. But the awareness reading these words right now, that was never created and will never be destroyed. Rest in this identity.
Where this verse sits
From 2.11 Krishna's first argument to Arjuna is that grief for the dead misunderstands what a person is. Verses 12 to 25 make the case: the self was never absent and will never be, bodies are worn like clothes, weapons and fire and water cannot touch it. Verse 20 is the densest statement of the point, and it closely parallels the Katha Upanishad, verse 1.2.18, which has almost the same words; the Gita is drawing on the Upanishads here.
What the words say
The verse piles up negations and epithets. The self is not born and does not die; having been, it does not cease to be; it is aja (unborn), nitya (eternal), shashvata (everlasting) and purana (ancient), and it is not killed when the body is killed. Shankara reads the verse as denying, one by one, the six changes that Sanskrit grammarians said belong to every existing thing: birth, existence, growth, change, decline and death. What is left when all six are denied is something to which time does not apply. Ramanuja reads the same words as describing the individual self, eternal and distinct, which supports the Gita's later account of many selves and one Lord.
A common misreading
It is easy to hear the verse as consolation, 'nobody really dies', and stop there. Krishna does not stop there; 2.31 onward asks Arjuna what follows for his duty, and 2.47 tells him how to act. The verse is part of an argument about how to live, not only about how to grieve. It is also not a claim about the body or the personality, which the Gita is clear are born and do die. The unborn one is what knows the body, and the verse asks the reader to consider whether they have ever actually met their own beginning.
Key Sanskrit Terms: