Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as the seal on the whole Vedic teaching. The state attained is the state of the supreme Self, that is, liberation, and it is reached by discriminating knowledge of the field, knowledge, and the knowable. They stress that this brief account is itself the entire meaning of the Veda and of the Gita, and that the devotee fit for it is one who sees the Lord, Vasudeva, in all that he perceives. The thrust is non-dual realization: the knower of Brahman becomes Brahman, and the verse therefore urges giving up the longing for trifling enjoyment and following the means of self-knowledge alone, with God as one's sole refuge.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Advaita Vedānta

This sub-commentary does not gloss the closing summary at all but instead works through a chain of objections about nature (prakriti) and the person (purusha). It treats the topic at hand as the beginninglessness of nature and the person, both being the Lord's powers, the lower and the higher. Its concern is doctrinal defense: it argues that the two natures, as the Lord's powers, are beginningless and are the root cause of beings; that they are not effects, since if they were, there could be no bondage before they arose and no guarantee of their re-arising; and that locating the cause in the two natures, rather than directly in the Lord, protects scripture, since otherwise even the liberated might be dragged back into worldly existence and the liberation-texts would lose authority. The upshot it secures is that, with nature beginningless and the modifications and qualities its effects, the Self stands free of modification and free of qualities.

Śrī Ānandagiri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Within this school the supplied texts pull in two directions. One closes the field-knowledge-knowable triad and fastens the upshot plainly: the candidate, the devotee, knowing this triad, approaches the Lord's own being, which is the destination. The other reads the verse as the teaching that nature (prakriti) and the person (purusha) are mutually conjoined and beginningless, and that the modifications which cause bondage, such as desire and aversion, and the qualities which cause release, such as freedom from conceit, are all born of nature, not of the person. On this reading the one beginningless nature, conjoined with the person and set going from beginningless time, becomes by one set of its own changes the cause of bondage and by another set the cause of release. The shared accent is that the goal is to approach the Lord's own being, while the second voice draws out how nature alone, not the person, is the source of both bondage and freedom.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators are not glossing the summary line at all; they take up a question of teaching order regarding nature, the person, and the means to knowledge. They ask why the means to knowledge was stated first, and answer that it was placed early to make known its inclusion among the modifications, as an introductory step. They then ask why the Lord's 'power' (prabhava) was mentioned right after the means rather than in the proposed order, and answer 'because of multiplicity': just as making a needle and making a cauldron need not follow a fixed priority, so here the power is named next because of its manifold character and, above all, its great usefulness as a means. Their point is that, while the worldly fact of being an impeller needs no such aid to be experienced, the unworldly power requires the means of knowledge to come within the grasp of the intellect, so the power is fittingly stated right beside that means.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators frame the whole triad as expressions of the imperishable Self (aksara), holding that nature and the person were both formerly the Supreme Self and that whatever form he set himself in is called the aksara. The summary thus tells the field, the knowledge, and the knowable as so many forms of the aksara-Self, told briefly to make them easy to grasp. Their distinctive stress falls on the fruit: knowledge ripens fully only when it carries the devotee into the Lord's own 'bhava,' into being qualified with the Lord's own qualities and gaining the very form whose stuff is that bhava. Knowledge that merely settles a discursive question has not yet ripened; it is complete only when it makes the lover fit for the Lord's own being.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This reading is spare and pointed. He who knows this triad, made up of the field, the knowledge, and the knowable, he alone is truly the Lord's devotee; and he attains the Lord's state. The emphasis is that real knowledge of the triad and genuine devotion are not two separate qualifications but one: to know rightly is already to be the devotee, and that knower reaches the Lord's own being.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

Here too the supplied texts divide. One voice closes the section in summary: the field, the knowledge, and the knowable, expounded at length by the sages, have here been told briefly, and the devotee who understands them becomes worthy of 'mad-bhava,' the state of being-Brahman. The other voices read the verse as teaching that material nature (illusion) and the conscious individual self are both beginningless, having no originating cause, because they are the very power of the beginningless Lord; therefore their conjunction is beginningless too. Yet, they insist, though the two are eternally conjoined there is a real distinction between them: the modifications such as body and senses, and the qualities such as happiness, sorrow, grief, and delusion, are born of material nature, not of the conscious self, so the individual self is genuinely other than nature transformed into the field. One of these voices adds the homely images of a form always accompanied by its shadow, and grain that grows with its husk, to picture nature and the person as inseparable twins from time without beginning, while still holding that the one real entity is the person and the whole field of action is nature.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators read the verse straightforwardly as the chapter's recap and its devotional condition. One restates that the field runs from the great elements to firmness, the knowledge from humility to the perception of the end of true knowledge, and the knowable through the verses on the supreme reality, and that the single-minded devotee who takes the Lord as the Self of everything, feeling that all he sees, hears, and touches is the Lord, enters the Lord's being and so attains release from birth and death. The other lays the fruit strictly at the devotee's door, not at the door of one who has only studied or argued the three threads, and draws weight from the closing word 'upapadyate': the Lord's state is not produced but is the seeker's already-existing true nature, recognized at last.

Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas

Modern

This commentator reads the verse as the statement that both nature (prakriti) and the person (purusha) are eternal, and that the evolutes and the constituent qualities (gunas) all spring from nature. He then sets two philosophies side by side. In Samkhya, nature and the person are eternal, independent of each other, and self-created. In Vedanta, nature originates from the Supreme Lord and so is neither self-created nor independent, yet because one cannot say when nature arose from the Lord, and because the person (the living being) is a part of the Lord, Vedantins still admit that both are eternal. His point is to show how the verse can be read consistently with Vedanta's derivation of nature from God while still upholding the eternality of both.

Lokmanya Tilak