Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse through a fourfold classification of seekers by the fruit they desire: the afflicted (whose distress God removes), the wealth-seekers (whom He grants prosperity), the doers of desireless action who seek to know (whom He grants knowledge), and the knowers or renouncers who seek liberation (whom He grants liberation). A key point made here is that one person cannot at once be a seeker of liberation and a seeker of some worldly fruit; these aims belong to different persons, which is why the favour differs. 'Bhajami' is glossed simply as 'I favour' by giving the appropriate fruit. The reason all follow God's path is that He is the Self of all, so even worship of Indra and other deities is, in truth, worship of Him. One source adds a striking image: creatures are God's reflection, and love or hate shown to the reflection passes only to the reflection, so honour or insult never reaches the prototype, leaving God untouched by inequality or cruelty.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here 'bhajami' is read not as giving a fruit but as God making Himself manifest, showing Himself in the very form the devotee conceives and longs for. Those who take refuge picturing God in a certain way experience Him in exactly that way, by their own instruments of sight and the rest. One source develops this through the doctrine of the divine descents and the worshipable image-forms: God lets Himself be approached as husband, son, charioteer, friend, brother, or servant, in whatever intimate relation the devotee wishes, and even shows His supreme self in the consecrated image. The seeming pain, fear, or pleasure in His descents are pure enactment, since He is by nature free of all evil. The charge of favoritism is set aside because His self-showing simply matches each devotee's own desired mode.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

This school carefully blocks any reading that would make God subordinate to His worshippers. 'Bhajami' is glossed in the causative sense, 'I cause them to be served' or 'I give fruit', never 'I become their servant'; God serves them only by giving fruit, not by becoming dependent. A distinctive doctrine here is the denial of liberation to the threefold-Veda men: those who worship other deities and the ancestors, even while knowing Vishnu in a general way as supreme, gain only heaven and the like, not release. God gives liberation to the true knowers and a lesser, proportionate fruit to the rest, 'in proportion to their service'. This is not partiality, because the gradation follows from the difference in the worshippers' own understanding and service: the knowers worship God alone knowing Him to be the sole enjoyer and impeller of all sacrifices, while the threefold-Veda men, not knowing this, sacrifice to other deities out of desire. All nonetheless follow God's path because He alone is the enjoyer and impeller of every sacrifice, the One denoted by the divine names in the Vedic mantras.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Bhakti

The Gaudiya commentators key the reciprocity to whether the devotee holds God's birth and deeds to be eternal. Those who worship knowing His birth and pastimes are eternal, with their longings fulfilled in those very pastimes, are made His eternal attendants and given love itself as the fruit, descending and withdrawing with Him over and over. Those who hold His birth and deeds to be perishable and His form to be made of maya are, in turn, given the corresponding result: repeated perishable births and the suffering of birth and death. But knowledge-seekers who hold His birth and deeds to be eternal and His form to be being, consciousness, and bliss are granted the imperishable bliss of Brahman and the end of birth and death. One source, the Marathi Jnaneshwari, adds that all beings are naturally inclined to worship the divine, but those clouded by ignorance fracture the one nameless Supreme into many idols and names, seeing high and low divisions in what is everywhere one and the same.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Śuddhādvaita

Read through the Pustimarga or path of divine grace, the verse becomes God's open hand. He meets every approach in its own key: the qualified soul by his loving attachment, the ill-aimed worshipper by his patience, like a wish-fulfilling tree, and like a smile in a mirror answering the smile of a face. One source draws out an inner reason for the matching: of the two direct paths to God, devotion and knowledge, if the soul has a relish for one and God did not grant precisely that, the soul's wish would go unfulfilled, sorrow would follow, and God's very selfhood toward that soul would suffer a breach; so He answers exactly as asked. Even worship of other deities is gathered up at last as worship of Him, since those deities are His own portions, though such undiscriminating worship does not, in the closer reckoning, bring the worshipper all the way home to Him.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

Those who take refuge with whatever understanding are favoured by God taking that very form toward them. All alike, both those 'made of Me' and those 'not made of Me', follow His path, for rites like the Jyotishtoma are no separate road; that ordering is God's own will, as is the fourfold ordering of social classes that He created. This source also notes a grammatical alternative read by some: the present-tense 'they follow' may carry the force of an injunction, 'they should follow' or 'they would follow', as elsewhere in Vedic usage; and it observes that the full ripening marked by enjoyment and release belongs to the human world alone.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

The modern voices largely confirm the reciprocity reading while drawing it toward the seeker's life. One states it plainly: God rewards each according to their ways and motives, granting the selfish the objects they desire and the unselfish liberation, and is not partial to anyone. Another reads the second line as moral law, that the whole world is under God's ordinance, none may break it with impunity, and as we sow so shall we reap, without fear or favor. A third notes that the second line carried a different meaning earlier in the text, illustrating how word-meanings shift in the Gita by context, and that Krishna will go on to explain why people reach Him by different paths. The most fully developed modern reading turns the verse into the warmth of relationship: in whatever bond the devotee takes God, as guru, disciple, parent, son, brother, friend, or servant, God becomes the very best of that, and grows as restless for the devotee as the devotee for Him. This source insists, however, that though the two match in kind, God moves by His own infinite power, not the devotee's pace, and that the one real obstacle to reaching God is the seeker's claim of ownership over his understanding, means, time, and capacity, which are in truth God's own.

Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas