Bhagavad Gita 5.13 is Chapter 5, Verse 13, in Karma Sanyasa Yoga (Renunciation of Action). Below are the Sanskrit text, a transliteration, a plain-English translation and an explanation.
sarva-karmāṇi manasā sannyasyāste sukhaṁ vaśī nava-dvāre pure dehī naiva kurvan na kārayan
"Mentally renouncing all actions, the self-controlled embodied soul dwells happily in the city of nine gates, neither acting nor causing action."
What This Means:
The self-controlled person mentally renounces all actions, not physically stopping, but internally releasing ownership. They live happily in the body (the 'city of nine gates': 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, mouth, and 2 lower openings), neither doing nor causing anything to be done.
Going Deeper:
'Manasa sannyasya' (mentally renouncing) is key, true renunciation is internal. The body is poetically called 'nava-dvara pura' (city of nine gates), suggesting the soul is a resident, not an owner. 'Na eva kurvan na karayan' (neither doing nor causing to be done), the Self is completely uninvolved in action, even as the body acts. This is living as a witness.
How To Apply This:
Your body is a city you're visiting, you enter through nine gates to experience the world. But you're not the city, and you don't have to manage everything that happens. Live as a happy resident, not an anxious owner. The city runs itself; you just observe and enjoy.
Where this verse sits
Chapter 5 answers a question Arjuna asks in its first verse: which is better, renouncing action or performing it as yoga? Krishna's reply is that the two are not rivals, and from verse 7 onward he describes the person in whom they meet. Verse 8 and 9 give the inner posture, 'I do nothing at all', held even while seeing, hearing, walking and breathing. Verse 13 is the summary image of that state: the body as a walled city with nine gates, and the self as a resident who has stopped running it.
What the words say
The first line hinges on manasa, 'with the mind'. On the karma-yoga reading the renunciation is of ownership rather than of activity, which is why the person is described as happy and self-controlled; Shankara, by contrast, takes the verse to describe the renunciant who has given up the activities of body, speech and mind as far as they can be given up. The nine gates are the two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, the mouth and the two organs of excretion and generation; the same image appears in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, which calls the self a swan sporting in a city of nine gates. Shankara reads the verse as describing one who has discriminated the self from the body and so knows it never acts. Ramanuja reads it through the Gita's account of the gunas: the activity of the body belongs to material nature, and the self's agency in it arises only from its karma-conditioned union with that body, so the self keeps its will and effort while owning none of the body's doing. Shankara and Ramanuja thus part on whether the self is an agent at all, but agree that 'neither doing nor causing to be done' is how the wise person regards the body's activity.
A common misreading
The verse is sometimes quoted as permission to give up work. Whether it describes a renunciant or an active person is a real disagreement among the commentators, and this page does not settle it. What the next two verses add is the ground of the claim. In 5.14 the prabhu, the self, which both Shankara and Ramanuja take to be the referent while disagreeing about its nature, creates neither agency nor actions nor the joining of act and result; nature does that. Verse 5.15 adds that the self takes on no one's sin or merit, a line Shankara reads as the self's non-acceptance of either and Ramanuja as its not undoing another's suffering or joy. On Shankara's reading the self never acts at all; on Ramanuja's it acts only through its conditioned union with the body. On either, the verse describes a freedom from ownership that a monk can hold and that Arjuna, who is about to be told to fight, can hold too.
Key Sanskrit Terms: