Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read Krishna's non-doership as real and absolute: he simply has no sense of 'I' as the producer of the body and the rest, and so he is genuinely not a doer at all. Knowing the Lord here means knowing him as one's own Self. The knower realizes 'I am not a doer, I have no craving for the fruit of action,' and for him the actions that would produce a body do not even arise; he is freed by the very knowledge of the non-agent self. One voice in this school insists that mere intellectual knowledge of the Lord's non-doership is not enough: without direct realization of one's identity with the Lord, the root of doership cannot be pulled out, and binding is not escaped.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators hold that Krishna's agency is real, not denied; what he lacks is one specific role. The 'actions' here are the varied creation of gods, humans, and the rest, not merit and demerit. The Lord is the mere occasioning cause of creation; the variety among beings, who becomes a god and who a human, is set going by the beings' own prior karma, their merit and demerit, not by him. So he is the universal cause but not the cause of the inequality, and on this ground he is 'no doer' of the differences and is not stained by them; the scriptural support given is that 'inequality and cruelty are not, because of dependence,' and the saying that the Person is the mere occasioning cause while the powers of the things to be created are the chief cause. Knowing him thus frees the seeker from the prior karmas that obstruct the discipline of action.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

This commentator grounds non-staining in freedom from craving, then presses the point: if the Lord is unstained only because his desires are already fulfilled, why is another person, whose desires are not fulfilled, also not stained by good deeds? The answer is that freedom from craving itself, not fulfillment, is the real cause of non-staining. So another person too, who acts free from craving and offers his action to the supreme Lord, is not bound. This reading moves straight into the next verse's call to perform action as the ancient seekers did.

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

These commentators allow that the Lord has a wish but no clinging to it: 'though he longs, that supreme God does not desire as the world desires,' for Vishnu has no grasping and his very desire is knowledge. They also press the cause-and-effect link as fitting only on their reading: for souls there is attachment as the cause of the taint of action, but for the Lord there is not, and the bare appeal to unreality cannot explain the difference, since unreality would belong to the soul's activity too. They further insist liberation is not for some only but is universal by stages, citing the Mahanarayana Upanishad that 'knowing him thus, the knower comes no more to death,' and they read the present-tense 'is not bound' against the earlier past tense 'they attained my state,' resolving the worry that all souls would already be liberated by holding that the souls are endless, surpassingly endless like the Lord beyond the moments of time.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse through the path of grace and loving relationship. The Lord's freedom from longing for the fruit is precisely his distinction from the individual soul; whoever knows him as such comes to share his very dharma, the share in the Lord's freedom from craving being the seed of a Lord-like life in the devotee. One voice adds that the Lord acts without being smeared because his acting is itself his rasa, his delight, not a means to anything else; the knower who imitates that posture is likewise unsmeared.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators set the verse in Krishna's situation as the supreme Lord who has nonetheless descended and acts. Though he is the Supreme Lord, full of his own bliss, he performs action solely to set the world in motion; like a rain-cloud he is a mere occasion for creation, his compassion stirred by the hunger of the embodied souls dissolved in primal matter, while the variety among beings comes from the beings' own prior works. They read the verse at once as the Lord's self-defense and as his instruction: to know his freedom from karmic stain is to begin to share in it, since knowing the cause of his non-stainedness, the absence of egoism and craving, weakens those very things in the knower. One voice adds the vivid image that motiveless action, like a burnt seed that can never sprout, becomes the very cause of the seeker's emancipation.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators draw the verse toward the practitioner directly. The teaching is for the seeker before it is anything else: act as the Lord acts, free of longing for the fruit, and the very nature of action shifts from bondage to liberation. One voice notes that worldly people, thinking themselves the agents and expecting fruits, take birth again and again, while one who works without attachment, egoism, or expectation is freed from birth and death. Another ties the verse back to the earlier teaching that one who understands the Lord's birth and action attains release, stressing that 'understands' means understands and acts accordingly. Another sees here the supreme example of one who is in action yet not its doer, so that when we are but instruments in his hands there is no room for arrogating responsibility for action.

Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas