Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as describing the knower (jnani) in whom freedom from joy and aversion is a mark of realization. One reads the laying-aside of good and bad as cleanness or purity being explained, and connects the renunciation to giving up actions that are means to happiness and means to sorrow. One carefully qualifies the renunciation: when the verse says he gives up the auspicious and inauspicious, this does not mean he drops the Veda's enjoined daily and occasional duties; what is renounced is action done apart from those, the merely desire-prompted and optional deeds. The devotee here is also glossed as ever-zealous and skilful (daksha) in devotion.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators frame the man as one on the discipline of action (karma-yoga) who, on gaining or losing the very things that occasion ordinary people's joy and grief, wife, son, wealth, stays unmoved, and who does not crave even pleasant things when they are absent. They stress that merit, exactly like sin, is without distinction a cause of bondage, so both must be given up. One adds a guarding point: the word 'devout' fastens that these negations are not the bare ascetic kind but are grounded in devotion (bhakti), so this is the renunciation of a lover of God, not mere self-denial.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the devotee's stillness through surrender to the Lord's will. He does not grieve even at the loss of wealth, nor pray for it nor worry over it, holding the spirit that the Lord alone is master and ordains everything by his own will. The auspicious and inauspicious are read as heaven and hell, which he lays aside. Knowing the Lord's wish in every place, he conducts himself in its light as play (lila), so that his whole life becomes a relaxed participation in the divine will rather than an anxious management of outcomes.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators read the verse warmly in terms of the loving devotee. One gives homely examples of what is 'dear', a son or pupil, and explains that both merit and sin are renounced because both are equally obstructive. One reads it through realized knowledge: the devotee feels no delight in sense-objects because he counts nothing as good as the Supreme; no hatred remains because all distinction has vanished in the knowledge that he himself is the entire universe; he never grieves for the lost in full confidence that what is truly his own cannot be lost even at the end of a cosmic age; and he never aspires because all already exists within his own self. To this realized one Krishna swears there is nothing so dear.

Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators draw out the inner mechanism and the practical path. One explains the four as expressions of attraction and aversion, traces how their absence leaves a natural evenness, and gives the lamp-and-sun image: a man at night wants a lamp and is glad when it is lit, angry at whoever puts it out, anxious in its absence, but under the midday sun he has no such reactions; the God-attained one is like the midday sun. The same voice clarifies the renunciation: the devotee's good deeds become non-binding (akarma) because they are done without 'mine-ness', attachment, or desire for fruit; and his bad deeds simply do not arise, since their roots, craving and attachment, are absent. It is not action that binds, but attraction and aversion within action. One notes that this verse elaborates at length the brief description given earlier in the chapter.

Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak