Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as a portrait of the formal renouncer (sannyasin) who has truly given up the world. The word 'moves about' (charati) is taken to mean wanders, with no activity left but the bare maintenance of the body; one even glosses it as moving at random, taking food by chance wherever prarabdha, the karma already set in motion, carries him. On this reading the freedom from longing and mine-ness extends even to the few things the body's survival demands, so that not even a loincloth is felt as 'mine.' One of these commentators answers an objection head-on: if even a householder who has dropped egoism and contemplates Brahman attains liberation, would renunciation be mere foolish show? He replies that the verse, taken with what precedes it, prescribes these qualifications as things the seeker of liberation must accomplish by effort, and their proper fruit is kaivalya, aloneness or isolation. The peace reached is nirvana, the extinction of all transmigratory pain, and the knower 'becomes Brahman.'

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri

Modern

This commentator flatly rejects reading 'charati' as 'goes about begging,' calling that interpretation wrong. He argues that the same word in its forms was used a few verses earlier to mean moving among the objects of sense with the senses controlled, and that the Gita has nowhere taught that the man of steady wisdom should become a mendicant; on the contrary it has plainly said he should move freely among sense-objects while mastering them. So here 'charati' must mean 'performs action' or 'takes part in worldly affairs.' On this view the verse describes one who acts in the world, having given up all desire (that is, all attachment) and become free of mine-ness and egoism, and so wins tranquility. The whole thrust is that peace belongs to the active, desireless person, not to one who has withdrawn into begging.

Lokmanya Tilak

Dvaita

These commentators fasten on the word pumān, 'man' or 'person,' in the verse and give it strong force: such a one alone is a true person, while another, still ruled by desire and ego, is no better than a beast. They also read the verse with care to avoid making the four terms redundant: if 'desires' meant particular wishes, then 'free of longing' would just repeat it, so 'desires' is taken as objects, the things desired; the conceit of being the doer is what egoism means, and the conceit of ownership is what mine-ness means, not the bare notion 'I.' Importantly, one of them adds two limits on how far to press the verse. First, the phrase 'he alone' completes the sense that this person reaches liberation, but the verse is not here being used to argue the larger doctrine that liberation belongs only to the knower; that is settled elsewhere. Second, nothing in the word 'person' here excludes women from this attainment.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Advaita Vedānta

This commentator argues that the relative pronoun 'whoever' (yah) makes the verse a prescription, an instruction to be carried out, and not merely a description of the marks of an already-perfected sage. His reasoning is grammatical and from ordinary usage: if the verse only described someone, the universal 'whoever' would be pointless, and in everyday speech the form 'he who does so' is used to enjoin an action, not to describe a third party. So even where the chapter does set out the marks of the man of steady wisdom, it finally rests on telling the seeker what to do. He also reasons backward through the terms: the mine-ful person, thinking 'let this be mine,' covets another's wealth, but the mine-less does not, and this freedom from mine-ness itself flows from being free of ego, for in one without ego no mine-ness appears even in deep sleep.

Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Bhakti

These devotional readers keep the same four renunciations but color the peace with God-centered fullness rather than mere extinction. One describes the true sthitaprajna as ever well-fed with the bliss of the Supreme Self, abiding in the great bliss of oneness with the universal life and wholly united with the whole. Another says the rare person fit for single-pointed devotion to Bhagavan, having dropped all desires, wanders everywhere in that very desolation precisely because he is intent on the Lord alone. Where the Advaita reading frames the goal as the cessation of sorrow, the devotional reading frames the same letting-go as clearing the ground for, or arising from, absorption in God.

Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrī Puruṣottama · Vallabhācārya

Modern

This commentator adds a point about the nature of the peace that the others do not press: shanti is svatahsiddha, self-established, already present in every person. Peace does not arrive from somewhere outside once desire and the rest are dropped; rather, restlessness was only ever manufactured by craving to enjoy pleasure from things that arise and perish and by holding them as 'mine.' When desire, longing, mine-ness, and I-ness fully fall away, the peace that was always one's own is simply experienced. He also reframes nihspriha gently: it does not mean the sage refuses the things the body needs. He still eats, still keeps watch over what is wholesome and unwholesome, still behaves outwardly much as before; what is gone is the anxiety over whether those things come or not, whether the body lasts or not. The sage has already gained the one thing for whose sake the body was taken up, so the body's continuance no longer grips him.

Swami Ramsukhdas