Advaita Vedānta

These commentators develop at length how knowledge can free a person who still has a body and still acts. They face an objection: actions done before knowledge arose, in this life and in countless past lives, plus actions done after, surely must still bear fruit, so how can rebirth simply stop? Their answer is that all such accumulated actions are burned up by knowledge, as scripture repeatedly declares and as the Gita itself says elsewhere ('as a kindled fire reduces fuel to ashes'). Actions sprout future births only when they are rooted in the afflictions of ignorance and desire and joined to the sense of 'I' and to a personal aim; once knowledge destroys that root, the seeds cannot sprout again, just as roasted seeds do not grow. They make one careful exception with the image of the arrow: the actions that have already begun this present body (prarabdha) are like an arrow already released, which must complete its flight and only then fall to rest; so this body and its course continue until that momentum is spent. The knower, however, is untouched, because he no longer identifies with the body and stands as its mere witness. Actions whose fruit has not yet begun are like an arrow still fitted to the bow but not loosed, which can be drawn back; knowledge renders these seedless. One source notes that even being engaged in seemingly forbidden acts, as when Indra is said to have killed, does not produce rebirth for such a knower.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Swami Sivananda

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This commentator reads the verse tightly around its grammar: the verse 'fastens the fruit of right knowledge,' namely non-rebirth. The phrase 'however he conducts himself' is given a precise force: the outer career, once the inner knowledge is correct, does not produce the rebirth-consequence. What produces non-rebirth is the inner knowing alone, never the outer conduct. The reading stays at the level of cause and effect, drawing the line clearly between inner knowledge as the operative cause and outer behavior as not the cause, without elaborating a theory of how accumulated actions are destroyed.

Vedānta Deśika

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator frames the saving knowledge specifically as 'the vision of Brahman whose form is the absence of all difference.' By that non-dual vision the yogin knows Prakriti, the Purusha, and the qualities together with their modifications, and by that vision, however he may conduct himself in any way whatever, he is liberated all the same. The accent falls on the differenceless vision as the liberating insight.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Śuddhādvaita

This commentator gives the object of knowledge a theistic turn: the Purusha and the Prakriti along with the gunas are to be known 'as of the Bhagavan-form,' that is, as belonging to or being of the form of the Lord. One who so knows them, standing thus in any manner of behaving, is not born again into samsara; rather he simply becomes mukta, freed. The freedom is read as attaining the liberated state, with the known reality understood in relation to Bhagavan.

Śrī Puruṣottama

Modern

This commentator spells out the content of the right knowing in plain terms: the Purusha is without beginning, unattached, and complete (anadi, asanga, paripurna); the Prakriti with her gunas is the womb of body and action; and all experience of pleasure and pain arises only from an imagined relationship between the two. Because that imagined relationship was the sole cause of birth, once it is gone the person is no longer born, no matter his present mode of life, whether householder or renunciant, wealthy or poor, busy in affairs or in solitude. The Lord deliberately says 'however he may be living' precisely so as not to lay down any single outer form as the requirement for liberation. The decisive thing is right understanding of Purusha and Prakriti; the outer form then simply fits the seeker's prarabdha without binding him.

Swami Ramsukhdas