Advaita Vedānta

These commentators ground the mutual non-agitation in non-dual seeing. The devotee, as a seer of non-duality and a renunciant who gives fearlessness to all beings, does not shrink even from wicked people whose one aim is to distress the innocent, because he is supremely compassionate and forbearing. Because he sees the one Self everywhere, the four agitations find no foothold and abandon him as unfit for them; he himself makes no effort to drop them. One reading adds that this egolessness has two forms, absorbed in samadhi like a motionless log, and the same calm carried into ordinary post-meditation life, and the devotee bears both marks.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the stress falls on the candidate's certainty that he is at odds with no one. He does no action whatever that makes the world shrink, and the world in turn does nothing that makes him shrink, precisely because of this firm conviction of universal non-contention, with no aggression and no contentiousness. For that very reason he is freed of gladness toward anyone, of impatience toward anyone, of fear toward anyone, and of agitation toward anyone; the four inner agitations are named precisely as the objects negated in him.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse through loving service of the Lord. The devotee is established in seva, acting with friendliness and refining each conduct in its proper season, so the world is not agitated; and even when the world is averse to those ways, he stays steady in his own dharma, like Prahlada. The absence of the four agitations is given a positive turn: because everywhere all is of the very form of the Lord, no separate object can flash forth to elate him, so he is of the very nature of joy at all times; intolerance is gone because he knows all is the Lord's play; fear is gone because he knows the Lord's power to protect; restless craving is gone because his mind never wavers at the time of service. He is unagitated even by a world bent on uprooting him through ascesis.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These devotional commentators add the note that, immersed in the exceedingly deep delight of the Self, the devotee is untouched even by contact with the agitations, and though freed from them himself he is not actively engaged in releasing others. One sets the verse in a wider frame: by repeated devotion to the Lord all the gods with all their qualities come to dwell in the devotee, so these further qualities arise of their own accord, and the passage names them to show how rare they are. Another likens it to the sea, whose storming neither frightens its creatures nor wearies the sea of them; the devotee looks on the whole universe as his own body, feeling no more disgust for any being than the body feels for its own limbs, identifying himself with all.

Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīla Viśvanātha

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator reads the larger passage around the term aniketa, without a fixed abode, meaning one who has no resolve that this alone must be done by me. Taking pleasure, pain, and the rest with the relish of accepting things as they come, his heart absorbed in the field that is the supreme Lord, such a one attains the supreme absoluteness with ease alone.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These commentators dwell on lived psychology. One argues at length that the devotee's freedom from harsha does not make him a joyless being: his gladness is constant, single-flavored, and untouched by the coming and going of objects, because he sees the Lord everywhere and is always delighted in his beloved and His play. The same voice distinguishes a helpful aspirant's wish, may I rise as he has, from amarsha, the envious why has he risen, which carries a tendency to fall; it maps fear onto outer dangers, inner guilt, and above all death-fear, all rooted in identifying with the body; and it reads the threefold appearance of udvega in the verse as showing the devotee neither agitates, nor is agitated, nor is thrown by frustrated effort, untimely seasons, or natural calamities. It notes too that the Lord says muktah, freed, rather than bhaktah here, to underline that the devotee is free of every vice, since pride in one's virtues itself opens the door to vice.

Swami Ramsukhdas · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Sivananda