Advaita Vedānta

These commentators take the key word 'matra' first of all as the senses, the instruments by which sounds and other things are measured, though they allow that it can also be read as the objects, or even as the measuring subject, so that on any construal it is the connection of sense and object that yields cold, heat, pleasure and pain. One of them works the verse into a full teaching on superimposition: the sense of being a sufferer ('I am pained') is present only in waking and dream, never in deep sleep, samadhi, or trance, so it appears in the self only occasionally and falsely, like a snake seen on a rope. A real thing and an unreal thing cannot be truly joined, so the properties of the knower never really touch the inmost self; the cognition 'I am pained' is mere delusion, and scripture is cited that the unattached Purusha is not followed by what it seems to undergo. Endure grief, then, with this in mind: it is not truly yours at all.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Advaita Vedānta

One of these commentators sets the verse against opponents (Vaisheshikas, logicians, Mimamsakas, Sankhyas) who hold the self to be many and to carry pleasure and pain as its own particular qualities; on their view the death of kin really would bring the self loss of pleasure and gain of pain, so grief would be fitting. The reply discriminates the subtle body: the sense-contacts are modifications of the inner organ taking the shape of objects, and they give pleasure and pain to that inner organ alone, which itself arises and perishes, not to the eternal, all-pervading, changeless, quality-less self. Property and property-bearer are non-different, so the changeless cannot be the substrate of changing properties, and the witness cannot bear what it witnesses. The error of the opponents is to ascribe change and difference to the self through delusion. Endure the contacts by discriminating them away, knowing 'these do nothing to me,' and refusing to superimpose the sufferer onto the self. The other commentator adds that 'cold and heat' are named apart from pleasure and pain in order to point, through the agreeable and disagreeable that lie within objects, to the very causes that then generate pleasure and the rest.

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators gloss 'matra' as the tanmatras, the subtle elements; sound, touch, form, taste and smell together with their material substrata are called 'measures' because they are the effects of those subtle elements, and 'cold' and 'heat' stand for the whole sweep of agreeable and disagreeable contact. Their distinctive stress falls on the purpose of endurance: bear the contacts with steadiness until the scripturally enjoined action, the war and the rest, is brought to completion, just as in penance and sacrifice one endures heat, cold, hunger, thirst and the killing of sacrificial animals until the rite is finished. They also draw a precise lesson from 'impermanent': the contacts come and go now, and when the karma that causes bondage is finally destroyed, they cease by their very nature; one of them adds that even in liberation these contacts are absent, so the verse denies not only momentary permanence but any 'eternity-by-continuous-flow.' Because cold and heat as such are not at issue on a battlefield, one of them reads them as a placeholder for the falling of weapons and for whatever each person's station and duty requires one to endure.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators take 'matra' as the sense-objects, since they are what gets measured out, and they press hardest on the point that pleasure and pain do not belong to the self in itself. Their proof is from coming-and-going: if pain were the self's own, it would be present even in deep sleep, but the sense-contacts are found only in waking and the like and vanish in sleep, swoon and dissolution, so they cannot even claim permanence as an unbroken stream. The self's only link to them is that of a subject to its objects, knowing them as a witness, the way one rightly speaks of 'the self's knowledge' though knowledge is a state of the mind. One of them develops a striking further claim: the bare contact of object and sense does not by itself give pleasure and pain; it does so only when accompanied by 'conceit,' the attachment that superimposes agreeableness onto things, the aversion born of imagined enmity, and the excessive sense of 'mine' toward body, senses and inner organ. Take that conceit away, as in sleep, and even contact yields no pleasure or pain, just as a house one regards as one's own burning causes grief while another's does not. So the real root of suffering is the self's confused identification with the body; give that up, and the death of kinsmen brings no pain. 'Endure' here is read as 'render fruitless.'

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Bhedabheda

This commentator's note on the verse is brief and stays close to the surface: from contact arises that which does not cease, namely the pleasures and pains caused by cold, heat and the like. He frames the surrounding teaching by the recognition 'I am the same' through childhood, youth and old age, by which direct perception establishes the eternality of the self, and asks why, if the self is indestructible, Arjuna's grief should arise in vain. He does not build the verse into a developed system here.

Śrī Bhāskara

Śuddhādvaita

One of these commentators gives only a compact gloss: the sense-object contacts are the source of the cold-heat and joy-sorrow pairs; they come and go, are non-eternal, so bear them. The other adds a devotional turn drawn from the address 'Kaunteya, ever-affectionate one': cold things touched make one shiver, hot things burn, meeting friends brings joy and parting brings sorrow, yet one's own pleasure and pain are not to be brooded over. Rather, considering one's friend's pleasure and pain, one should simply bear one's own, since the contacts are not stable. This shifts the weight of endurance toward concern for the loved one rather than absorption in oneself.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators read endurance practically, as the command to keep performing one's scripturally enjoined duty even when it hurts. Two of them use the same vivid analogy: just as one does not abandon the enjoined ritual bath in the cold month of Magha merely because the water is painful, so Arjuna must not abandon his enjoined duty of battle merely because it brings the pain of fighting Bhishma and the rest; the pain there is incidental and is to be borne, since the act is accomplished through duty, and to drop one's duty before steadfast knowledge has ripened is itself a great calamity. One frames the worry as the undiscerning mind being pervaded by grief 'as by demons,' and answers that not the mind alone but all the sense-functions, in their commerce with objects, cause distress. Another keeps the focus on composure, closing that what is unfitting is to lie helplessly under elation and depression. The Marathi voice among them dwells at length on how the senses drag the mind to their objects and breed delusion, illustrating with words that wound as slander and please as praise, soft and hard touch, ugly and handsome sight, fragrance and stink, sweet and bitter, all from the same faculty, and likens the sense-objects to a noon mirage or a dream-glory, fleeting and ephemeral, to be wholly let go.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators render the verse in a plain, psychological key. One traces the physical route: objects strike the senses (skin, ear, eye, nose), the nerves carry the sensations to the mind seated in the brain, and it is the mind that feels pleasure and pain, so one should patiently bear heat and cold and cultivate a balanced state of mind. Another keeps the gloss spare: these contacts of external things, which produce cold and heat or happiness and unhappiness, come into being and die out, so they are impermanent; bear them without lamentation. The most fully developed of the three reads 'cold and heat' as the favorable and the unfavorable, and insists that objects have no power of their own to give pleasure or pain; a person joins himself to them and fashions in them the idea of 'favorable' or 'unfavorable,' and only then do they appear as givers of pleasure and pain. For this commentator, to know 'this is favorable, this is unfavorable' is no fault; the fault is to let attachment, aversion, elation and grief rise in the inner organ over them. To endure is to remain unchanged amid the contacts, knowing that the body, senses and inner organ and all their changing states are not you, but are known by you who stand apart from them.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas