Advaita Vedānta

On this reading, anabhisneha is the absence of a particular tamasic distortion. Sneha is described as a clouded modification of the mind by which another person's loss and gain get superimposed on oneself, so that you treat their fortunes as your own. The sage is wholly free of this affection toward everything that is not the Self. But this is not coldness, because the very same source insists that toward the Blessed One, the supreme Self, he is in every way full of affection; dropping affection for the not-self exists precisely for the sake of that one love. The reason he neither praises nor reviles is also analyzed: praising one's own people and reviling another's learning are both delusion-modifications that accomplish nothing real, so they simply do not arise in a mind of pure sattva that has nothing left to disturb it.

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri

Bhakti

These commentators agree the sage has dropped affection, but they carefully qualify which affection. What is gone is conditioned, adventitious affection, the kind that depends on circumstance and personal gain. Yet a slight, unconditioned affection does remain in him out of compassion, and this is said to be well known. So he is not emptied of all warmth; a tender, non-circumstantial care for beings persists even at the summit. They picture his evenness through the full moon that gives its light equally to the virtuous and to wrongdoers, making no distinction; ever kind to all, full of the Bliss of the Self, he neither praises a benefactor with blessings nor curses an offender with ruin.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Śuddhādvaita

Here the non-attachment everywhere is grounded in the vision that all things belong to and are pervaded by Bhagavan. The reasoning is distinctive. If the sage joyously praised a friend's success, he would introduce unevenness into what is in truth a universal belonging-to-Bhagavan, treating one outcome as specially his own. If he censured the agent of an adverse turn, dazzled by his own sense of righteousness, he would forget that the turn too is Bhagavan's doing. So one who knows that everything is Bhagavan-pervaded drops the very split between auspicious and inauspicious and, on this reading, speaks only what is auspicious. Such a one is held to be the highest, his prajna supreme over all.

Śrī Puruṣottama · Vallabhācārya

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This commentator reads the good and the bad of the verse in relational terms: they are union with the dear and separation from the dear. The sage is indifferent toward dear things, and so on meeting either reunion or loss of loved ones he is free of both gladness and hatred. Notably this source frames the verse as describing one more stage in a graded series; having stated this mark, it signals that a state lower than this one is described next. So the verse is read as one rung in a ladder of steady wisdom rather than as a standalone portrait.

Rāmānujācārya

Dvaita

These commentators are brief and focus on a textual difficulty. Since the previous verse already called the sage free of attachment, fear, and anger, saying here that he does not hate looks like mere repetition. The resolution is found in the word everywhere (sarvatra): the earlier verse and this one are not redundant because what is negated here is aversion that has a specific cause, the not-hating that follows from having no fondness anywhere at all. On this reading the verse adds a real point rather than echoing the one before.

Śrī Jayatīrtha · Madhvācārya

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator says little about praise and blame and instead unpacks what established wisdom means. The wisdom is prajna that is settled fast, and its being settled fast consists in this: there is an eternal settledness already present in the Self, and the wandering that takes the form of desire, produced when the mind scatters itself among objects, has turned away. With that wandering stilled, the title one of established wisdom fits the yogin in its very root sense. On this reading the verse completes the answer to the first of Arjuna's questions about who the sthita-prajna is.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

This non-sectarian devotional reading gives the fullest metaphysical account of why the steadiness holds. Abhi-sneha is identification with things: the feeling that when they last I have lasted, when they spoil I am spoiled, when wealth comes I am great, when wealth goes I am killed. In the sage this is wholly absent, so even while he still touches things outwardly he is inwardly unsmeared. The decisive insight, now fully awake in him, is that the good and bad of the world have no real relation to him: these occasions keep changing, but his own true nature never changes, and the changing cannot have a relation with the unchanging. Difference seemed real only because of identification with the body; when that drops, the difference in the intellect drops and the intellect becomes one-tasted, fixed in the supreme. In a second sense, the limited intellect can never contain the limitless supreme by its own sharpness; but when it dissolves into that limitless Self, nothing other than the supreme remains in it, and that is its being established.

Swami Ramsukhdas