Bhagavad Gita 2.22 · BG 2.22
Chapter 2Verse 22
Sankhya Yoga
वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि। तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही॥
vāsāṁsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhṇāti naro 'parāṇi, tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny anyāni saṁyāti navāni dehī
Translation
As a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so the self casts off worn-out bodies and enters into new ones.
The body is worn like clothing. What's underneath it doesn't end.
What does this mean?
One of the most quoted lines in the Gita, and it's a simple image. What you wear isn't what you are. The body changes the way clothing does. What's underneath continues on.
In simple words
This is the famous line comparing the body to clothing. When a shirt wears out you replace it, and you don't think the real you has ended. Krishna is saying death works the same way for what he calls the self. The body is the garment. What wears it carries on.
The deeper idea
The verse rests on a distinction between the body and the self that occupies it. In the Gita's framework the self isn't produced by the body and doesn't end when the body does, and changing bodies is treated as ordinary, closer to changing clothes than to being destroyed. Whether or not you accept the metaphysics, the move it's making is worth noticing: it asks you to locate your identity somewhere other than the physical form that's always aging and breaking down. That's what takes some of the terror out of the change.
How it applies to life
Most fear of death is really fear of the body failing, the diagnosis, the decline, the ending. This verse doesn't argue you out of that with logic. It offers a different place to stand: if what you most fundamentally are isn't the body, then the body wearing out is a change of clothes, not the end of you. People who sit with this idea often find it loosens the grip of that fear, even a little, when a parent gets old or a scan comes back wrong.