Viśiṣṭādvaita

This school agrees that the verse opens the list of the marks of knowledge that yields the discrimination of the field from its knower, and that these marks are outward signs that accompany the knowledge rather than the knowledge itself. But Ramanuja reads the opening terms in a strikingly different way from most commentators. Where others begin with amanitva as 'freedom from self-esteem,' this reading takes the first marks as: dispassion toward the objects of the senses, attained by dwelling on their faultiness; freedom from egotism, understood as dropping the conceit that the self is the body (which is not the self) and also dropping the sense of 'mine' toward what is not one's own; and the keeping-in-view of the fault of pain that comes with embodiment in the form of birth, death, old age, and sickness, by dwelling on how unavoidable that pain is. The deity-commentary names these as the heart of the candidate's inner stance toward himself, others, the teacher, and the world.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhakti

This devotional reading follows the same line as the Vishishtadvaita opening and unfolds it at great length. It takes the first marks as dispassion toward sense-objects, freedom from egotism, and repeated contemplation on the miseries of birth, death, old age, and disease. Dispassion is rendered through a chain of vivid images: the seeker recoils from sense-objects as the tongue recoils from food already vomited, as one will not embrace a corpse, swallow poison, or enter a burning house. Freedom from egotism (here equated with 'heart-control') means his actions hang loose from him, like clouds suspended in the sky or pearls slipping off a cut thread, so that he forgets even his own existence as a person while still acting rightly. The contemplation of decay is drawn out into a long, unflinching forecast of old age and disease, so that the seeker, while still young and healthy, prepares for death and so 'wards off future births.' Steadiness and self-restraint appear as stopping the doors through which sins enter, by packing them with the stones of self-discipline.

Sant Jñāneśvar

Advaita Vedānta

This school keeps the standard nine-term reading, beginning with amanitva as freedom from self-esteem and adambhitva as freedom from pretence. Its distinctive stress is on these qualities as the intimate, inner means to liberating knowledge: the self that is restrained is described as the aggregate of effect and instrument, the body-and-senses complex which by nature runs in all directions and works one harm, and which is to be held back onto the path of liberation alone. One commentator in this line adds that dispassion belongs in the list precisely because, if attachment to the many seen and unseen objects remained, knowledge would be obstructed and could not arise; so seeing the fault of pain in birth, death, and old age is counted among the causes of knowledge only because it produces that dispassion.

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

Dvaita

This school glosses the terms tightly and leans on lexical authority. Pretence (dambha) is defined, with a citation to the lexicon, as 'the showing of greatness even when one knows one's own smallness.' Uprightness (arjava) is the non-divergence of the actions of mind, speech, and body, that is, their agreement with one another. Its sub-commentary is concerned to answer a structural objection: since six topics had been announced as the subject of this chapter, why are humility and the rest, which were not among those six, now introduced? The answer is that these marks are to be drawn out by the later passage beginning at 13.13, and uprightness in particular is explained so that it functions as a genuine means to knowledge, understood as lying upon the good path.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

This school reads the list with a devotional, Bhagavan-centered turn in the inner qualities. While it keeps the standard nine terms, it redefines the two kinds of purity and steadiness in terms of God: inner shaucha is purity of the form of 'remembering the Bhagavan,' and sthairya is steady standing even in calamity by way of being 'for the Bhagavan.' Atma-vinigraha is given a more bodily sense here, the holding-back of the body by bearing hunger, cold, and the like. The lead commentator of the school keeps his own gloss deliberately compact, holding that the list itself unfolds the matter and that the weight is to be carried by the closing 'this is declared to be knowledge' verse.

Śrī Puruṣottama · Vallabhācārya

Kashmir Shaivism

This reading lifts the whole list toward a single non-dual conviction. It notes that the field and its knower have been explained, and that knowledge is now stated, running from 'absence of pride' down to its end. The governing idea is the 'undeviating yoga' named later in the passage: the firm, unwavering conviction that 'there is nothing else, nothing further, apart from the supreme Self, the great Lord.' That conviction itself is the yoga, and from it comes unswerving devotion, which cannot stray because the desires that would cause straying are absent, or rather because those desires too are only further modifications of the mind and are wholly made of that one reality. The qualities of this verse are read against their opposite, which is ignorance, as for instance pride and the rest.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta