Advaita Vedānta

These commentators give clean, mostly lexical definitions and read the verse as the Lord declaring His conditioned might as the presiding source of the whole world's inner material. Buddhi is the inner instrument's power to apprehend subtle objects; jnana is apprehension of the Self and the rest; satya is speech uttered just as one has seen, heard, or experienced, including one's own experience of the Self, so that it can be conveyed into another's understanding. Two small grammatical 'ands' in the line are read as gathering both the stated items and the unstated ones, intellect and knowledge among them, and the word 'indeed' marks these as well known to everyone. Sukha and duhkha are traced to merit and demerit as their uncommon causes. The whole list is offered as the means of bondage and liberation set forth so that seekers of liberation may know the Lord as the one to be worshipped.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Ānandagiri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read the items pointedly as mental states, since the topic of the passage is mental states, and they make this explicit even for words that could name outward things. Buddhi is the mind's power of determining; jnana is the certainty whose object is the particular conscious-and-unconscious thing; asammoha is the ceasing of the error that takes one thing for another, like mistaking a shell for silver. Satya is defined not only as speech matching what was seen but as speech of the form of the welfare of beings. Bhava and abhava are read inwardly, as the mind's lift caused by a favorable experience and the mind's sinking caused by an unfavorable one. Reading this verse together with the next as one composition, these commentators count twenty inner states in all, holding that the list exhausts the candidate's inner field. The phrase 'from Me alone' is taken to rule out locating the source in matter alone, in the intellect-aggregate, or in accumulated karma: the Lord, pervading the inner field of every being, is the source, with matter as the instrument and karma as a concurrent condition through which the inner state arises.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators insist that buddhi and jnana are not the same thing, against any reading that would make them redundant. Citing a lexicon, they hold that jnana is cognition while buddhi is specifically the determination of what is to be done and not done. They likewise rework the pair dama and shama: drawing on a verse of the Bhagavata, they take shama (tranquillity) as the intellect's being settled on the supreme Self, on the Lord Himself, not merely the quieting of the inner organ, while dama is the curbing of the senses. They explicitly reject the view that dama and shama are simply the quieting of outer and inner instruments, arguing such a reading makes one word do the other's work; the right distinction is steadiness in the supreme Self for shama and curbing the senses for dama.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the list through the Lord's inconceivable lordship and through bhakti. Jnana is taken as a stand-in for the whole production of qualities, good and bad alike, since a later verse will say 'from Me everything proceeds.' They give the terms a devotional coloring: shama is the peace whose form is the gaining of supreme bliss; sukha is the bliss of the Lord's own being or presence, and duhkha is the hiding of that bliss; bhaya includes the fear at the hour of death and the torments of Yama, while abhaya is the absence of that fear gained by reaching the Lord's feet. They stress that as presiding deity of the several paths the Lord apportions to each follower his own pleasure and pain according to the path he treads, and they conclude that matter and the rest are mere instruments, not causes, so that the Lord's own chief agency stands declared.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators read the list as showing the Lord's lordship of the world, with the doctrinal weight carried by the running construction 'all these arise from Me alone,' not by any single member. One of them adds a sharp point: the intellect, knowledge, and freedom from delusion are themselves produced from the qualities of maya and so are born from the Lord; precisely because they are mere products, they have no power of themselves to enter into Him who is beyond the qualities. People imagine these three as though they were the cause of knowing His true nature, but they are not the cause. The states are then sorted by the three gunas: pleasure, patience, truth, restraint, calm, non-violence and fearlessness arising from knowledge are sattvic; pain and fear are tamasic; and qualities like contentment, austerity, charity, fame and infamy are sattvic or rajasic depending on whether they are unconditioned or conditioned. Even so, all of them, though they come to be through His maya, are 'from Me alone,' because the power and the possessor of the power are one. One commentator in this group also frames the whole list within the answer to why even those learned in scripture cannot reach Him by their own intellect.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators stay close to plain definition and practical sense. One expands patience to mean enduring without lamentation the three classes of suffering, the bodily, the elemental, and those from other creatures, and not even wishing harm on one who has assaulted or abused you; he also stresses that truth allows not the least exaggeration or modification of fact, and ties sukha to virtue and duhkha to its lack. Another renders the terms briefly as reason, knowledge, non-delusion, forgiveness, truth, sensual restraint, tranquillity, happiness, unhappiness, and reads bhava and abhava simply as coming to life and death. A third dwells on the inner powers themselves: buddhi is the mental movement that fixes a thing with respect to its purpose, and jnana is the discriminating knowledge that separates essence from non-essence, the eternal from the non-eternal, duty from non-duty, and he notes that this power of discernment has been given to every human being by the Lord.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas