Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as a strong call to inner mastery and link it to liberation. One sets the limit at death precisely because, for anyone alive, the surge will keep finding occasions, so vigilance can never relax. Another likens the surge to a river in flood: as a swollen river casts even an unwilling man into a pit and drowns him, so the force of desire and anger, fed by brooding on objects, drags even the unwilling into the pit of the senses and down toward great suffering; the one praised is like a great fish that holds its place against the flood, bearing the surge by the dispassion called mastery, born of seeing the fault in objects, so that the surge bears no fruit. One source weighs and rejects an alternative gloss: 'before leaving the body' does not mean 'lying inert like a corpse with no surge at all,' because then the very image of bearing a surge would not apply, though it then preserves that corpse-image in a second reading, where the living liberated one is as unruffled by desire and anger as a corpse is unruffled while embraced by wailing women or burned by sons, citing Vasistha that one still joined to the breath may yet dwell in the abode of kaivalya.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read the power to bear the surge as resting on a positive source: the joy of the experience of the self. It is by that inner joy, felt here in the very state of practicing the means, that one is able to check the surge of desire and anger. The one who does so is fit for the experience of the self now, and after release from the body will come fully to the happiness of that experience. The holding-out is understood not as mere suppression but as a steadiness that does not move with the surge; the demand is for the body one now wears, here and now.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators stress that the verse continues the theme of giving up the enjoyment of desires for the sake of renunciation, and they bring the following verse under the same topic. Their distinctive emphasis is that bearing the surge is uniquely possible, indeed easy, in the human body and not elsewhere; the worlds of Brahma and the rest belong only to those who have already conquered desire, so one cannot first win those worlds in order to conquer desire there, which would be a mutual dependence. Therefore the conquest must be made right here, in this very world, in a human body. The bodies of beasts and the like are set aside as unfit for the work. One source reads 'impulse' (vega) as the unsteadiness of the mind and argues on grammatical grounds against taking the phrase to mean 'until the release of the body,' since that would require a different construction and would make 'here itself' pointless.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse through the path of grace and devotion. The one praised not only bears the rush of desire and wrath but, even while bearing it, never lets go of the means of release: he keeps his hold on the Lord's hand. One source notes that otherwise the matter would settle itself by the mere departure of the body, leaving no place for human effort, and cites Vasistha that the work must be done while the breath is still within. The 'release of the body' is read as the time of attaining the supra-mundane body. Anger here is given a specific cause: the disturbance felt at seeing one's own wish fulfilled in others. The one who is steady is joined to his true devotional form and would be the Lord's own devotee; the present hour, in the body, is the very labor of the path of grace, not a promise of release only after the grave.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator strikes a note of ease and encouragement: the task is not hard. If the surge born of anger and desire is borne for just a moment, up to the time of the body's end, then there follows the attaining of an absolute happiness. The smallness of the required holding is set against the greatness of the result.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators read the verse as marking who truly shares in liberation. One holds that liberation alone is the supreme human goal and the surge of desire and anger is its chief obstacle, so that only the one who bears that surge, reining it in at the very moment of its arising and not for a single instant only but until the body falls, is liberated, gathered, and happy, and none else. Another notes that even one fallen into the ocean of worldly existence becomes, by this power to bear the surge, the very yogi and the very happy one. One source unfolds the inner fruit at length: those who have mastered the body's ills no longer even know the misery of sense-objects; absorbed in the bliss of the Self, they forget themselves as the enjoyer, individual souls merging into the Supreme as water mingles with water or wind becomes one with the sky, so that with duality gone there remains only undivided Being, and no separate experiencer is left to taste it.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators read the verse as practical, present-life instruction. One ties it directly to Krishna's earlier counsel to bear pain and pleasure equably without avoiding them, noting that bearing pain and happiness equably is the very mark of being yukta. Another presses the corpse-image into an ethical key: as a corpse has no likes and dislikes and no sensibility to pleasure and pain, so one who is alive yet dead to these truly lives and is truly happy. One source insists desire and anger are powerful enemies of peace, hard to annihilate, requiring strong effort, and makes the verse a charge to eradicate them by resting in the innermost Self. One source goes furthest into method: every human is the qualified candidate, with no exclusion of caste or stage of life; since death gives no notice, the surge must be borne first of all, and the deepest reading is not merely to hold the surge back but to refuse the very thought (sankalpa) of desire and anger before it can grow into a surge, because once action begins along the line of desire and anger the body and mental states are no longer in one's own sway. This source adds that holding the surge back out of fear or greed does not make one happy, since one merely trades anger for fear and greed; true freedom comes from not accepting desire and anger as one's own at all, recognizing that they are passing comers and goers, known as separate from oneself, modifications of nature and not of one's true nature, which is changeless.

Lokmanya Tilak · Mahatma Gandhi · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas