Advaita Vedānta

On this reading the fallen yogi in question is one who had taken up renunciation of action and the inquiry into Brahman, the study and hearing of the Vedanta, and died before completing it. The assurance is worked out against the scriptural worry that one who follows neither the path of the gods nor the path of the fathers becomes a lowly creature, and that a brahmin who falls from his own dharma sinks to a degraded ghostly state. The fullest of these commentaries answers this directly: drawing on the doctrine of the five fires, where it is taught that those who worship faith as truth pass by the path of the gods to the world of Brahman, it argues that the fallen seeker is not in fact cut off from that path. He has already gained faith, and gained truth (understood as the restraint of false speech, or even as Brahman itself, since hearing the Vedanta is contemplation of the true Brahman), so even without completing the rite he is fit to attain the world of Brahman. Renunciation, faith, truth, and the inquiry into Brahman are each on their own a means to that world, so combined they cannot fail; the conduct of such a yogi has the value of all rites together.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read the verse as covering both kinds of fruit a seeker might fear losing: the lower enjoyments of heaven and the rest that belong to matter, and the higher experience of Brahman. 'Destruction' would be sin in the form of failing to gain what is wished, or of gaining what is unwished; neither befalls this man. The one who has set out on the discipline with faith has accumulated merit whose fruit cannot be lost, because the discipline he undertook is itself of the form of the supremely auspicious. So he is not consigned to an ill course at any time, in past, present, or future. One source frames the logic precisely: the good already done is not undone by the non-completion, and the fruit of the action and the latent disposition (vasana) built up through yoga have their own independent reckoning that survives the break.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Kashmir Shaivism

This reading rests the whole assurance on one point: the fallen yogi's faith is not destroyed. Because his faith survives, he does not perish in this world or the next. What he has done is the auspicious thing whose mark is the path of the Lord, and that auspicious deed, unlike the fruit of an ordinary sacrifice such as the Agnishtoma, is not subject to wasting away. The contrast with the spent, exhaustible fruit of ritual is made the explicit ground of why this good cannot fail him.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse devotionally as a covenant. The reason 'na hi' is unpacked as: this man is a doer of good and not of un-good, so since his deed is of the order of the auspicious, no inauspicious fruit can possibly fall on him. Beyond the general logic, one notes a 'pusti' (grace) reading in which the assurance is taken as the Lord's own personal promise of safekeeping: the very portion of the seeker's heart that had turned toward the Lord is not lost out of His grip, even when the outward discipline breaks. The other develops the same thought in terms of devotion set in motion by trust in the Lord's word, so that 'destruction' would mean the failure of the Lord's sight or favor upon him, which cannot happen. The shared Vaishnava sense is that no soul once turned toward the Lord falls to the void; the seed once sown is kept warm until it sprouts.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These devotional commentators ground the assurance in the seeker's having entered yoga with faith, which makes him a doer of the auspicious; on that basis no destruction in this world or hell in the next belongs to him. One stresses that the yoga itself is what brings auspiciousness, performed both here and hereafter. Another, reading from the soul's higher destiny, glosses the two destructions denied as the loss of heavenly happiness and, more importantly, the loss of beholding the Supreme Self, and adds that the attainment of that beholding will surely still come to him hereafter. The Marathi voice in this group reframes the whole matter warmly: one who longs so for the bliss of liberation can have no fate other than liberation; he must only undergo a kind of vexatious detention along the way, but even that detention carries a happiness the gods do not have, and he is destined to reach liberation in the end.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These modern commentators keep the plain reassurance and one in particular develops it with concrete illustration. The fallen yogi will not be destroyed here or hereafter and will surely not take a birth lower than his present one; the doer of beneficial action never reaches an unhappy end. One of them explains the deeper point: the seeker does not fall below the spiritual standing he has already formed, his accumulated material for practice (sadhana-samagri) is not destroyed, and his ultimate aim does not change. He illustrates with the story of Bharata, the king who, distracted by attachment to a deer-cub at the moment of death, was reborn as a deer, yet kept the memory and good tendencies of his past life even in that animal birth and did not truly fall; and with everyday examples of beings born even as animals who still listen to the Lord's stories, so that good nature and sacred impressions (sat-samskaras) are never lost.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas