Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read 'made of Me' and 'My state' as actual identity with the supreme Self. To be 'made of Me' is to be a knower of Brahman who sees no difference whatever from the Lord; the 'thou' and the 'That' are realised as non-different. 'Knowledge as austerity' is steadfastness in knowledge alone, deliberately independent of any other austerity or works; one source treats the phrase as the very mark that the discipline here is pure knowledge and nothing else. The fruit, 'come to My state,' is liberation itself, the supreme purity, the being-consciousness-bliss nature of the Lord, reached by the mere removal of ignorance, since nothing was ever truly separate. One of them carefully rules out the rival options of knowing Brahman as different, or as both different and non-different, and of combining works with the vision of non-difference.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here 'knowledge as austerity' is specifically the true knowledge of the Lord's birth and deeds, the avatara-mystery, which is itself hard-won and so counts as a tapas; the cited scripture 'the steady know rightly His origin' shows that only the foremost among the wise grasp how He takes birth. Crucially, these commentators reject the identity reading: 'My state' (mad-bhavam) does not mean becoming one and the same as the Lord. Even in liberation, sameness-of-identity is opposed by scripture; the text's own grammar ('he attains Me') keeps the soul as the agent attaining and the Lord as what is attained, and the Gita will later promise only 'likeness to Me' (sadharmya). So mad-bhavam means attaining a nature like the Lord's, marked by the freedom from sin and the other auspicious traits, by extreme similarity, not by merger. 'Free of passion, fear and anger' is glossed as loving Him alone: there is no passion for other objects, no anger rooted in such passion, and no fear, since one neither likes nor dislikes any rival object.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

This commentator (working from a damaged critical text) reads 'made of Me' and 'taken refuge in Me' as two qualifications used together precisely to show that the devotee has no other refuge at all: ever resorting to the Lord alone, with the mind fixed on Him in this form. He draws a sharp contrast with merely worldly dependence: just as a person may feel great affection for a king yet only resort to him for security and welfare without truly taking refuge, here the meaning is genuine refuge, not such interested reliance. On the key compound he insists that 'knowledge and austerity' be taken together as a single unit, jnana-tapas, the two fused into one, on the principle that 'every pair becomes as one.'

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

These commentators flatly deny that 'made of Me' (manmaya) means having the Lord as one's self or being identical with Him. It means 'abounding in Me,' that is, having the Lord as one's inner ruler. The liberated see nothing anywhere apart from Him, but this is explained carefully: in every object there is some existence, and the knower sees that all of it is dependent on the Lord alone. So the realisation is of total dependence on Him, not of merger into Him. One of them also notes that the verse points ahead: since the next verse adds something more, this verse is stating the purport partly to produce faith, and is not meant to say this much and no more.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

For these commentators the verse answers an objection: if the Lord's birth and action were ordinary, material (prakritic), no one taking refuge in Him could ever be released; yet many plainly were. So this avatara itself is the liberating power. One reads 'vita' (free of) in a special Sankhya sense of 'not pervaded by': even souls who still carried passion or fear or wrath, those very condition-coloured moods, were made pure of the faults belonging to such states by the direct power of the avatara itself, by the kita-bhrnga ('wasp-and-grub') transformation into 'I am That.' The Gopis, Kamsa, and Caidya are given as those released by this very descent. The other commentator distinguishes this knowledge-route from service-laden devotion: refuge through knowledge is real and yields liberation, but it is austere and lacks the rasa-tinged sweetness of bhakti full of service; such ones do only the bare act of taking refuge, not loving service. The shared Pustimarg note is that by whatever path they came, it is finally the grace of the avatara, the universal solvent of every form of bondage, that opens them.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This terse reading ties freedom to fullness: knowing the Lord thus and being 'made of Me,' the freed are wholly full, and because they are full they are free of anger and the rest. Their mark is that they perform the action that is to be done as fruitless, that is, acting without grasping at any result; and so many have attained the Lord's own form.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators read the verse through love and the avatara's compassion. One stays close to the non-dual sense, glossing 'My state' as union (sayujya) and reading the jiva as attaining oneness with the Lord through its conscious aspect; the jnana-tapas here is Self-knowledge attainable by the Lord's grace, together with one's own duty (svadharma) as its ripening cause, the two taken as a single seat of practice. But the Gaudiya commentators redirect 'My state' (mad-bhavam) away from merger and toward love for the Lord, or His real presence, or direct vision of Him. For them the freedom from passion, fear and anger is specifically detachment from people given to false doctrine: the devotee feels no fondness, fear, or anger toward such prattlers. 'Made of Me' is being absorbed in hearing, chanting, reflecting and meditating on the Lord's birth and deeds, and 'taking refuge' is serving Him well. One offers a second sense of the austerity: it is the burning endurance, like swallowing serpent-venom, of refuting the many false doctrines and sophistical arguments against the eternal reality of the Lord's birth and deeds.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These voices read the verse psychologically and practically. One traces the inner mechanics: when one knows the Self, attachment to sense-objects ceases; realising oneself as the changeless eternal Self, one becomes fearless; desireless and selfless, seeing the Self everywhere, one can no longer feel anger; and jnana-tapas is the fire of wisdom that burns vasanas, cravings, impressions, sins and all karma. Another emphasises that the whole content of the required knowledge is simply the Lord's transcendental births and deeds: grasp those fully and one has grasped both spiritual knowledge and the secret of unattached action, which is all that is needed for release, so nothing further must be separately studied. A third gives a fine-grained chain of causation: from raga for perishable things spring mamata, kamana, lobha, then krodha at whatever obstructs, then bhaya of a stronger obstructor; remove raga and the whole crop falls; raga is removed by ceasing to treat things as one's own and instead placing them in the service of others, since we truly have no relation to objects or actions at all, and by trusting that the Lord, who needs nothing for Himself, takes the avatara purely for our welfare as the perfect friend of every being.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas