Advaita Vedānta

On this reading 'Sankhya' is right knowledge of the Self and renunciation is its inner means, while yoga is the yoga of action; both have the one highest good as their fruit because both produce the rise of liberating knowledge. Karma-yoga, rightly done with purification of mind and the disciplines of tranquility and self-restraint, ripens into knowledge, and knowledge alone is the direct cause of release; so even one path rightly followed yields the fruit of both. One source unpacks the goal in detail as abiding as the partless inmost Self once the whole manifold and all mental modifications are dissolved, and reads 'standing in' simply as 'performing' and 'fruit' as that non-conceptual self-abiding. These sources also firmly reject the forced reading that would split the verse into a separate 'fruit-Sankhya/yoga' and 'means-Sankhya/yoga', holding it inconsistent with Arjuna's actual question.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the two are the discipline of knowledge (jnana-yoga) and the discipline of action (karma-yoga), and these are explicitly not the Kapila Sankhya system or the Hiranyagarbha yoga system, since those have a different domain; they are the two paths taught earlier in the Gita itself, the path of withdrawal of the second chapter and the path of engaged work of the third. The childish view rebutted is precisely the claim that the discipline of action only accomplishes the discipline of knowledge while knowledge alone accomplishes the beholding of the Self, so that they would differ in fruit. Properly understood both yield the same supreme good, the self-vision and the end of bondage. One source then draws a further consequence absent elsewhere: since the fruit is equal, the easier and quicker path is to be preferred, and that is karma-yoga, which sets up the argument for action's preference that follows.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These sources read the verse against the worry that renunciation, having been called an inner aid to knowledge, might thereby be ranked lower than yoga. The answer is that both Sankhya and yoga are inner aids to knowledge, utterly indispensable to its arising, so there is no conflict between them and no demotion of either. Just as dispassion toward objects is shown to be what knowledge arises from, so karma-yoga too is internal to knowledge. The scriptural texts about the one 'deluded by the fire' and 'wearied by the smoke' of sacrifice, and the path of smoke from the sacrificial hall, are read as referring only to desire-prompted rites, which do not reach the Supreme Self ('his own world'); those who take such desire-driven ritual as the path to the highest good, or who deny that action is internal to knowledge, are the children spoken of.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These sources grant a real difference of method (in Sankhya one gives up action, in yoga one takes up action) but locate the single fruit in the Lord's grace. One reads the unity through the soul being brought, by either way, into the state where neither merit nor demerit can adhere, and stresses that for the Pushtimarga devotee the seeming difference of method is no obstacle, because the single fruit of release is what the soul receives from the Lord whenever He is taken as the only goal: the goal is one because the giver of the goal is one. The other gives a vivid image: Sankhya and yoga are twin ear-rings, both ornaments of one and the same Lord; the apparent opposition is dissolved not by abstract equation but by seeing them as twin ornaments of the same rasa-Lord, and any knowledge made apart from the Lord's own form is in fact mere ignorance. He who performs either under the Lord's command receives the one fruit of His grace.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This source states the unity in the strongest and most compact terms: there is simply no difference between 'this is Sankhya' and 'this is yoga', for the two are eternally connected. Knowledge is never without yoga and yoga is never without knowledge; hence the two are one. There is no talk here of one being a means to the other or of mind-purification leading to knowledge; the two are read as inseparable from the start.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These sources take 'Sankhya' as steadfastness in knowledge and understand the verse to point, by that word, to its limb, namely renunciation. The childish view is that renunciation and karma-yoga are separate and independent paths; this cannot stand because, as already said, the karma-yogi is to be known as the perpetual renunciant, so the two are not really divided. One source frames the underlying relation as gradation: one path is principal and the other its limb, so the two are joined by stages, and Arjuna's exclusive either-or question is itself the mark of one who has not yet seen how both paths drain into a single sea. One source adds that whatever goal the Sankhya adept reaches is the very goal the yoga adept reaches, that the two paths are one like a single lamp's light or like space and its void, and that the one who climbs the mountain of salvation by the path of action reaches the plateau of the Self's bliss sooner, while the one who fails at even-tempered action never attains true renunciation either.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These sources keep the plain teaching: only the ignorant, those with mere theoretical book-knowledge and no knowledge of the Self, say that knowledge and action give distinct, opposite results; the wise say both give the one result, liberation. One source pictures the unity practically: the yogi engrossed in knowledge lives even in thought for the good of the world and so attains the fruit of action by the sheer power of his thought, while the karma-yogi engrossed in unattached action naturally enjoys the peace of the knower; thus each, fully lived, already contains the other. One source identifies Sankhya with renouncing action's outer form, equates 'Sankhya' and 'sannyasa' as interchangeable terms in Krishna's usage, and stresses that 'children' includes those grown in age and intellect who still take the two to give different fruits because they look at the outer procedure rather than the actual outcome; the procedures differ but the goal does not.

Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas