Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read 'prakriti' simply as Arjuna's own innate constitution, the kshatriya-nature dominated by rajas (the active, passionate quality), with no appeal to an external controller. Nature here is a built-in disposition that begins and defines the warrior class, and it acts on its own momentum. Madhusudana adds the specific false conceit Arjuna hides behind: 'I am righteous, I shall not do a cruel act.' Nilakantha frames the whole verse as Krishna pre-empting a claim of personal independence and answering it with the principle that beings simply follow their nature, so resolutions against it are powerless.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the 'ahankara' Arjuna takes refuge in is precisely the conceit of independence: the false belief that he is autonomous in judging his own good and ill, set against and disregarding the Lord's direction. The deepest error is not just rajas, but ignorance that recoils at the thought of God's sovereignty. Prakriti that overrides him is presented as the cosmic mechanism of the Lord's order: the candidate's ego-born refusal will simply be overridden, and his resistance is futile against that order. The accent falls on the contrast between Arjuna's pretended independence and the Lord's real control.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators make explicit that prakriti is not autonomous but acts under the Lord's command: it is the outer power that is the secondary expression of svabhava, and it 'obeys my command' (Vallabha). Purushottama draws a sharp moral consequence: turning away from Krishna's command is itself what makes a person 'prakrita,' subject to nature and so driven by her, whereas one who acts from the Lord's command is not so engaged. He also identifies the ahankara concretely as the ignorance that takes the form of the adharma of refusing to fight, dressing itself as the scruple about killing elders. The practical upshot is to embrace and offer up the given work rather than attempt a doomed refusal.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

Sridhara reads the verse as a piercing of the illusion of resolve unaided by understanding: Arjuna's noble-sounding 'I will perish but not fight my kin' is empty because he is not independent, and rajoguna ripened in him will positively put him forth into battle. Jnaneshwar develops the imagery and the absurdity of the conceit: nursing this false self-notion is like feeding a fever by hating medicine, or feeding darkness by hating light. The whole refusal stands on arbitrary labels, body named 'Arjuna,' others named 'my kinsmen,' battle named 'sin,' and even by worldly logic it is incoherent that a man should first arm for war and only then invent a notion to avoid it. Inborn nature will topple the determination regardless.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

Sivananda and Tilak give the plain reading: the egotistical belief 'I will not fight' is futile, and one's inner nature as a warrior will constrain one to fight; the sense that 'I am Arjuna, these are my relatives, killing them is sin' is mere illusion. Ramsukhdas, distinctively, turns the verse into an analysis of freedom itself. He traces ahankara back through the cosmic unfolding (prakriti gives rise to the mahat-tattva, and from it ahankara, whose distorted portion is 'I am the body'), and argues that anyone fastened to ever-active prakriti can never be free of action. So Arjuna's wish to quit is not genuine freedom but one current of prakriti, soon overridden by another; true freedom is not in acting or not acting, but in dropping the ahankara that claims to be the doer.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas