Advaita Vedānta

Prakriti is the Lord's own power, his maya made of the three gunas, and both natures belong to the eternal Lord. The very possession of two natures, higher and lower, is what makes him the Lord; through them he is the cause of the world's arising, continuance, and dissolution. These sources reject the alternative that prakriti and purusha are self-standing eternals making the world on their own; if they were, then before they arose there would be nothing for the Lord to rule, he would be no Lord, transmigration would be uncaused so there could be no release, and scripture would have no purpose. Bondage and liberation hold together only when the Lord and his two natures are all eternal. The conscious self here is the individual self, kept distinct from the supreme Self, and its transmigration is explained as nothing but its experiencing of pleasure and pain.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

The body is the effect and the senses with the mind are the causes; Nature, when presided over by the person, is itself the cause of the activity that serves as the means of experience. But the person's role is only presiding, an overseeing; the person's agency is just being the cause of the effort that governs the body. The inner stir of the world arises from prakriti, not from purusha as such. Notably, though the person in itself enjoys only the single happiness of experiencing its own self, when conjoined with Nature it becomes the seat of the experiencing of the pleasure and pain that belong to outer objects.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Kashmir Shaivism

Prakriti, its modification which is the fourteenfold creation, and the person are all beginningless and eternal for one root reason: being suffused with the truth of Brahman, none of them is other than Brahman. Between prakriti and the person there is a mutual working, each depending on the other like the lame man and the blind man, and it is for this reason that the scriptural authors give the person many names such as 'the overseer.' The person, being the principal one, is the enjoyer.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Dvaita

The field is the whole class of conscious and unconscious things, everything other than the Lord. The word 'nature' here takes in the twenty-four principles beginning with the great elements; the word 'spirit' means the individual self; and the modifications, the three qualities and the rest, are stated separately by a deliberate intention of speech even though they too are part of the field. These sources reject reading the 'qualities' as merely pleasure, pain, and delusion construed as effect and cause; the three qualities of goodness, passion, and darkness are both what is effect and what is not effect. The verse states things 'in brief' precisely because the spirit will be taken up again later, and this avoids the fault of repetition.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Bhakti

Prakriti is beginningless because she is the shakti of the beginningless Lord, and purusha is beginningless because it is mad-amsa, a portion of that very Lord; so the self is not a creature made in time but as eternal as the Lord himself. On the joint working: although being effect, cause, agent, and enjoyer might all look like properties of Nature, the insentient side predominates in being effect, cause, and agent, while the conscious side predominates in enjoyment; so by the rule that names follow what predominates, Nature is called the cause in producing the body and the self is called the cause in enjoying. The conscious self presides over Nature, which becomes as if conscious through conjunction with him, and she, presided over and transforming by his deeds, brings forth the various bodies. One source pictures this as a strange marriage: Nature is the wife who does all the work and gives birth to the whole universe, while purusha is the husband who simply enjoys the fruit, the two utterly unlike yet bound together.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Śuddhādvaita

Prakriti and purusha are read as the Lord's own shakti and own portion, both beginningless by their connection to the Lord, both of sat-cit nature and non-different from the cause-form. This is the Bhagavata-Sankhya, not the worldly Sankhya: Nature is the Lord's power, not an independent eternal, and the Lord himself is never made an object of that science. The deeper key is that the body and faculties are not an alien deposit of karma to be repudiated; they are the place where the Lord's lila has stood and the very ground on which the discipline of the knower of the field becomes possible. The same Nature, joined with avidya, is the cause of bondage through her modifications of desire and aversion, and the same Nature, recognized through the knowledge fashioned of maya, with her modifications such as humility, becomes the cause of deathlessness. The bhakta who holds this reading does not look on his body as something to throw away but as the field unfolded for the sake of the Purushottama's rasa.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Modern

These voices hold that the discussion here is about the body and the self, not about cosmology, and they read the verse accordingly. One notes that some texts read 'karya-karana,' meaning the twenty-three Sankhya elements springing one from another, but argues that in a discussion of the body and the self a treatment of the world's origin is out of place, since how the world springs from prakriti was already explained earlier; on that ground prakriti is said to be the cause for the activity of the body and the senses, while purusha, without being a doer, is the cause for experiencing pleasure and pain. Another grounds the self's beginninglessness in plain observation: even a newborn child smiles and feels grief, fear, and pleasure, which cannot come from this life's deeds, so the impressions of a prior birth must exist and the self must be beginningless, or else two faults follow, deeds done bearing no fruit and fruits arriving for deeds never done. Distinctively, one of these voices turns the whole verse into a practice: since the vikaras and gunas are all Nature's doings and not the self's, the seeker is to give back to Nature everything that is Nature's, and what then remains is the self alone, pure, untouched, one with the supreme.

Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas