Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse through the lens of knowledge and ignorance. The threefold fruit is itself fashioned by avidya (ignorance); it is unreal, like a conjuror's illusion or a body seen in a dream, with no real footing in the Self, and the very word 'fruit' suggests something slight that quickly passes away. They distinguish two grades of renouncer. The 'secondary' renouncer keeps acting but gives up the aim at fruit; for him, even so, a body must still be taken after death and the threefold fruit follows, because action already done must ripen. The 'primary' renouncer is the wandering ascetic of the highest order, settled in knowledge alone, free of body-conceit, who knows the Self is beyond all action and that doership was only superimposed by ignorance. For him there is disembodied isolation, liberation, never any further fruit, because once ignorance is burned by knowledge its seeds of rebirth are destroyed. On this reading only the seer of the highest truth can truly renounce all action.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Sivananda

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read 'fruit' as specifically the fruit that obstructs liberation, and read the non-relinquisher as one lacking the relinquishment of agency, the sense of mine, and fruit. Their distinctive move is to assign the same Vedic acts, the fire-oblation and the great sacrifices, to different applications: as one and the same rite can serve mere subsistence or desire-driven ends, so it can be set apart and applied toward liberation, supported by the text that the divine is sought through Veda-recitation, sacrifice, giving, and austerity. The deepest note is the dwelling on non-agency in the self by recognizing agency in the supreme Person, the inner ruler: the highest Person, through the individual self and through its body and breaths, begins action for the purpose of His own play, so that both the fruit and the action that is its means belong to Him alone. This grounds non-doership in surrender to the Lord rather than in the unreality of action.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhakti

These commentators center the offering of action to the Lord. For the devotee, sinful action is impossible, and because even meritorious action is offered up to the Lord, its fruit too is given up, so the threefold fruit does not befall him at all. One source meets the objection that scripture binds sacrifices to their fruits, so that even unwished yield is unavoidable like an unwanted crop from sown seed; the answer is that offering doership and fruit-desire to the Lord is the scriptural renunciation, and the same act is both 'sannyasa' and 'tyaga.' Through extended images, one source shows how giving away the fruit is like a father giving his daughter in marriage and so being freed of further claim, while the one who grasps the fruit, like a buyer who swallows poison, gets entangled; relinquishing fruit ends actions the way eating the seed-grain ends future sowing, and through the preceptor's grace and self-knowledge the very nescience that gave action its life ceases.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Vallabhācārya · Sant Jñāneśvar

Dvaita

These commentators read the verse briefly as Krishna's praise of relinquishment. Their distinctive contribution is to face a precise objection: the absence of the fruit of action is nothing other than the cessation of transmigratory existence, so how can that absence be called a 'fruit of renunciation' at all? The answer offered is that this very point, peace and release as the outcome of renunciation, has already been established earlier in the Gita, so the verse rests on that prior teaching rather than positing a new positive fruit.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

This commentator presents the verse as the description of what it means to renounce the fruit, following on from the claim that the renouncer of fruit is the true renouncer. He spells out the three fruits concretely: the undesired is rebirth in hells or in such forms as the boar with their torments; the desired is the heavenly happiness of a divine birth; the mixed is birth as a noble human being with kingship and the like. The accent is that this threefold fruit accrues only to those who do not renounce the fruit, but never, anywhere, to the sannyasins who in this very sense of fruit-renunciation are the true renouncers.

Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator gives only a terse gloss, but a pointed one. On the phrase 'for those who do not relinquish,' he explains the non-relinquishers as those who are 'made of the fruit.' The non-relinquisher is not merely someone who happens to receive a result; he is someone whose very being is constituted by the fruit, identified with it, so that the fruit and the self are not held apart. This frames bondage as a matter of identity rather than of mere transaction.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These commentators read the verse as a summary and boundary marker. One treats it as gathering up ideas about tyaga, tyagin, and sannyasin that appeared earlier in the Gita: literal abandonment of all action is never accepted; the true and perpetual renouncer is the one who abandons only the fruit of action, and real abandonment is the abandonment of the self-interested hope of fruit, that is, the abandonment of egoism. The other reads it as the closing verse of the chapter's first section, then opens out into the practical questions a seeker actually asks here: the freedom promised is freedom from future accumulation of fruit, not the wiping out of the prarabdha (the karma already in motion), which runs to its end; prarabdha is itself the Lord's dispensation, since inert karma gives its fruit only by His ordinance; whether to withdraw from a hard situation or engage it is settled by discernment, not mood, and a duty that falls to one by station or circumstance remains a duty; harm done by another is to be borne without hatred, since returning harm out of a wish for revenge is itself a new karma that never breaks the chain.

Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas