Advaita Vedānta

On this reading 'giving up all dharmas' means renouncing all action whatever, because the word dharma here is stretched to include adharma, lawlessness, too; freedom from all action is what is meant. The supporting texts cited are scriptural sayings such as 'give up both law and lawlessness' and the verse that bids one realize Brahman beyond the done and the not-done. 'Take refuge in Me alone' is read as the certain knowledge of the one Self of all, present the same in every being, undivided, free of birth, age, and death, with the conviction that there is nothing other than that. Liberation comes when the Lord makes manifest the seeker's own nature as that Self; the freeing from sin is the lamp of knowledge destroying the darkness of ignorance. These sources develop at length that knowledge alone, not action and not knowledge joined with action, is the cause of the highest good, since liberation is eternal and not something action can produce, and they hold that this final verse fittingly concludes the standing in knowledge that follows the giving up of all action. One source within this school notes that Arjuna, being a warrior, is not himself the primary candidate for this knowledge-renunciation, but is addressed so the teaching may reach those who are qualified.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here 'giving up all dharmas' does not call for abandoning prescribed action, which the chapter has just insisted upon. It means doing the disciplines of action, knowledge, and devotion as worship of the Lord while giving up attachment to their fruit, their doing, and one's own agency, and resting on the Lord alone as the one doer, the one to be worshipped, the one to be attained, and the means. The sources read this as prapatti, total self-surrender: the seeker gives up reliance on any means as his own credit and takes the Lord as the sole sufficient source of release. An alternative reading offered within this school takes the 'dharmas' to be the endless expiations a seeker would otherwise have to perform for beginningless accumulated sins before he could even begin the discipline of devotion; the Lord tells him to give up those crushing expiations, which are impossible to complete in a measured lifetime, and simply take refuge in the supremely compassionate one, the ocean of love for those who take shelter in him. On both readings the Lord's part is the liberation and the seeker's part is only the refuge-taking, with the dharmas placed in their proper auxiliary role and the release reserved as the Lord's free gift. The future tense of 'I will free you' is taken as the Lord's binding warrant that the liberation is on the way.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

One reading within this school takes 'giving up of dharmas' to mean the giving up of the fruit of action, not the action itself, since war is being enjoined and could not be commanded if all action were to be dropped; the supporting verse is 18.11, 'he who is a relinquisher of the fruit of action is called a relinquisher.' A second reading in the same school holds that the abandonment of all dharmas, even those enjoined for the orders and stages of life, is genuinely being commanded here; the word 'dharma' is used to set aside any other interpretation, and it indicates by implication its own effect, the fruit, so that giving up the dharmas is giving up dependence on their fruit. The reasoning rests on the question of how war could otherwise be enjoined, resolved by reading the renunciation as renunciation of fruit.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

This school reads the verse as the door of grace (pushti) opened by the Lord, Purushottama, himself. To the seeker unable to perform the full principal dharma, the Lord teaches a fitted substitute (anukalpa): consign to him, the master-agent and supreme Self, the whole burden of dharma and karma, take single refuge in him, and do what he says. By 'all dharmas' the dharmas hostile to the path of refuge are meant, and other forms of worship that compete with single-pointed devotion; their giving-up is enjoined for Arjuna's placement in grace, while the dharmas not hostile to refuge continue, suggested by the earlier 'fix your mind on Me.' One source draws weight from the form 'mokshayishyami,' a causative where one might expect 'mochayishyami,' reading it as the Lord giving an unequalled grace beyond all calculation, the acceptance of the seeker as his own. The plural 'dharmas' against the singular 'Me alone' is noted as a contrast: the many dharmas are hard, performed with all their limbs, while the one Lord is easy to serve and able to bestow all fruits.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This reading focuses the giving-up on two specific mental notions Arjuna must drop. First, regarding all that happens in the waging of war, including the slaying of kinsmen, he is to drop the notion that it is a property of the self, the notion 'I am the doer.' Second, he is to abandon in mind the notion that in refraining from the prohibited act of slaying teachers there would be a dharma accruing to him. Letting both notions go, he is to take refuge in the Lord alone, the one doer of all, the free one, the presider over every nature; and for that very reason the all-knowing Lord will release him from all sins. 'Do not grieve' is glossed as: do not fall into the delusion of not knowing what is to be done.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

This reading takes the verse as the next step beyond the earlier 'fix your mind on Me': there the Lord was to be served alongside the prescribed disciplines, but here the firm conviction 'by my devotion alone all will come about' is itself the act. The seeker gives up the one-pointed clinging to enjoined performance and becomes one who has the Lord alone as refuge; this act of taking refuge is itself the highest dharma, and the Lord's pledge 'I shall release you' is its binding force. The center of dharma is relocated, not dissolved: works are not condemned, but the heart of the matter is giving up the self as the ground of one's deliverance and entering the Lord as that ground. The Marathi commentary in this stream reads the verse in a strongly non-dual key as well, describing the dropping of ignorance through knowledge until nothing distinct from the Lord remains, complete surrender as union with his essence, like the pot's space merging into the wide sky or salt dissolving into water, after which sin, which exists only through duality, can no longer touch the surrendered one.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These voices read the verse, against the knowledge-only interpretation, as the Gita's summing-up in favor of devotion and surrender. One holds that 'dharma' here means the various other religions and ways of reaching the Supreme, the religion of harmlessness, of truth, of service, of sacrifice, of charity, of renunciation, which Arjuna is told not to concern himself with; he is to surrender to the Lord alone in his perceptible form and, deeply devoted, perform all the actions that fall to him by his station, which this commentator names Karma-Yoga and the whole sum of the Gita's religion. Another, non-sectarian devotional voice settles 'dharma' as kartavya-karma, prescribed duty, and is emphatic that the duty is not to be dropped in its outer form, since the Gita everywhere forbids abandoning one's duty; what is given up is the reliance on one's own buddhi to judge dharma and the doer's ego, while the karma itself continues, now done as the Lord's, judged by the Lord, its fruit the Lord's. The Lord sees the subtleties of circumstance and inner motive that the seeker's own intellect cannot, so handing the judgment of dharma to him is the giving-up the verse means. A third modern voice presents both the Vedantic knowledge-reading and the devotional work-and-surrender reading side by side as two schools of thought, and reports that the Advaita master strongly refutes the idea that knowledge joined with action leads to liberation.

Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda