Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read non-agency as a metaphysical fact about the Self itself. The true Self is by nature changeless, partless, breathless, mindless, pure, the mere witness of the factors. Agency belongs only to what can change and combine with other things; since the Self is changeless it can join with nothing and so can never be an agent, even in concert with the body and senses. What looks like the Self's doership is a false transfer made by ignorance, like silver mistakenly seen in mother-of-pearl, or blueness wrongly assigned to the sky. The five factors named just before are imagined in the Self by ignorance, and they alone act. Realization of this non-doer, non-dual Self cancels the very root of bondage, so for the true renouncer no fruit of action arises at all. One of these voices adds that the verse also refutes rival positions: it denies the logicians' 'agent-Self' and the Buddhist claim that intellect is itself consciousness, by sublating the mutual mixing of the conscious and the insentient.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here freedom from doership comes through a relational realization, not through the Self being a bare changeless witness. The ego-free stance arises by dwelling on the supreme Person's agency: the knower settles into the understanding 'agency is not mine, this fruit is not connected with me, this action is not mine'. The act of killing, done in war with this right inner stance, therefore neither makes him a slayer nor binds him to its fruit. One of these voices frames the line 'he neither kills nor is bound' as the chapter's doctrinal grant to the karma-yogin: the outer act, performed with the correct inner stance, simply does not produce its binding consequence. These commentators also connect the verse to what follows, noting that this whole disposition of non-agency grows only as the quality of sattva grows.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators take the verse as praise of the one who knows his own self to be the non-cause, the inactive one. They press a sharp logical point through a real-world case: even in beings free of ordinary egoity, such as Indra slaying the demon Vritra, some slight bondage is still seen. How is this possible if freedom from ego means total freedom? The answer is proportional: whoever is even slightly bound is one who still has even a slight conceit of being the doer. Bondage tracks the residue of doership exactly. The construction holds, they add, because the speaker, Krishna, is wholly trustworthy.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators locate true agency in the supreme deity, the antaryamin, the inner controller. The ego-free state arises by constantly tracing all agency back to the Lord who dwells within the substrate and the other factors: the deed is recognized as springing into being by the Lord's will and as to be done by his command. So the person, even slaying these worlds, does not slay; he only acts as the Lord wills, and is therefore not bound. One voice reasons from the stronger case to the weaker: if even an extreme act like slaying brings no binding fruit when done in this recognition, then certainly enjoined acts that serve the Lord's worship bring no obstruction at all. Agency and the rest, they insist, are finally to be referred to the master-agent, the full and faultless Brahman.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators emphasize the seeing of the Self as other than the body. The man whose disposition 'I have done this' is gone sees that doership belongs to the body and the senses, so his understanding is not stained and he is not bound through the duality 'this is desired, this is not'. They reason from the harder case to the easier: if even slaying all beings does not bind such a seer, how could there be any fear of bondage in works that, through inner purification, ripen into knowledge? One develops this at length with many images: once Self-realization dawns, like fire turning everything it touches to fire, every object seen becomes one with the seer, so there is nothing left outside him to destroy; yet because he still has a body, actions continue from the momentum of nature, the way a wheel keeps turning after the potter lifts the pot, or twilight glows on after sunset. The ignorant, seeing only the body, call him the doer, but the deed never reaches his Self.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators stress the ethical and practical reading and guard the verse against misuse. One describes the egoless sage's killing as like the executioner's lawful act on behalf of the community, done without desire for the world's peace, and rehearses the Advaita reasons for the Self's non-agency. One reads the verse as an ideal, like a perfect straight line in geometry: held up as a standard even if no mortal fully reaches it, and warns that one who has truly made ashes of self has annihilated even his own flesh. One insists the verse is not authorization to do any evil one likes; sin lies in the reason, not in the act, so only the person whose reason is genuinely pure and to whom all beings are equal, and who is therefore incapable of injuring another, is meant. One stresses that the deed in view is the duty that came of itself by one's own nature, and that the real test of progress is not how much one can renounce doing, but whether even the most demanding duty can be done free of the I-sense and of clinging to results.

Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas