Nishkama Karma (niṣkāma karma)

Nishkama karma is action performed without craving for its fruit, the central practical teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna's formula is that a person has a claim on the act but never on its results, and that neither the results nor inaction should become a motive. It is offered to Arjuna not as a way of caring less but as the only way to act at all in a situation where every outcome is unbearable, and the epic returns to it whenever a character must do something necessary and terrible.