Eighteen verses into the fifth chapter comes a line that has travelled further in modern India than most of the Gita. The wise, it says, look with an equal eye on a brahmin endowed with learning and good conduct, on a cow, on an elephant, and on a dog and one who eats the flesh of dogs.
Read in its immediate setting, the verse is epistemological before it is ethical. The chapter is arguing that someone who has seen what the self is sees the same self everywhere, and therefore cannot rank its bearers by the bodies they happen to inhabit. The list is deliberately graded from the top of the social order to a category placed outside it altogether, and then flattened in a single clause.
The verse was cited constantly in the anti-untouchability arguments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by reformers who wanted a scriptural warrant that their opponents would have to answer. It was also cited by their opponents, who read equal vision as a description of the liberated sage's inner state rather than as a rule for social arrangement, and who pointed out that the same book elsewhere upholds duty according to station.
Both readings have textual support, and the atlas is not in a position to resolve a dispute that has run for two centuries in the courts of a living tradition. What can be said plainly is that the verse exists, that it says what it says, and that its history of use is part of what it now means. A reader who meets it only as philosophy is missing half of it.