Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse through the lens of discrimination between Self and non-Self. The knowledge that is carried off is the intrinsic consciousness, the partless awareness that is Brahman; maya both covers this bliss-essence (its veiling power) and projects the false identification of the self with the body-and-sense aggregate (its projecting power). Because that discrimination 'this is a means to the goal, this is a means to calamity' is gone, the deluded cannot tell the path from the pit. Maya is named here as the very root of all calamity, and the demonic disposition is the conceited drive to nourish the body taken for the Self. Liberation lies in establishment in the Lord, which alone transcends maya.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read the listed terms as four kinds of evildoer arranged by increasing gravity, each later kind more sinful than the last, yet overlapping in the same persons and describing one obstacle from four sides. The deluded are those of perverse knowledge, attached to matter, who fail to grasp the Lord's true nature and wrongly hold that the self, whose one savour is being subordinate to the Lord, and the things to be enjoyed, are subordinate to themselves. The lowest of men know the Lord's nature in a general way yet remain unfit to turn toward him. Those whose knowledge is carried off had genuine knowledge of the Lord and his lordship, but it was destroyed by deceitful arguments that make such knowledge seem impossible. Those in the demonic state turn even firm, well-established knowledge of the Lord into a ground for hatred. None of these take refuge, not because refuge is closed to them, but because their own condition has closed them off from it.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

This commentator reads the verse briefly: their knowledge carried off by the maya just spoken of, such people have resorted to the demonic disposition characterized by deceit, falsehood, and the like. The comment moves quickly to its complement, raising the question of who, by contrast, does take refuge, and pointing ahead to the four kinds of doers of good deeds, the distressed, the seeker of knowledge, the seeker of wealth, and the knower.

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

These commentators take 'knowledge' (jnana) as the very nature of living beings, citing the Vyasa-yoga that knowledge is the intrinsic mark of jivas and is overpowered (apahara meaning overpowering) by maya. They give a precise etymology of asura: 'asuras' are those who delight in the breaths or senses (asu), supported by the Naradiya, 'the gods have knowledge for their chief mark, while the asura is given over to the breaths.' A subtle point follows from their threefold classification of souls: the lowest of men are included among the demonic, and only such souls, those of false knowledge born of unrighteousness, are meant here, not the deities or the higher and middling men, whose knowledge is not merely false. They carefully guard against misreading: where scripture speaks of even good jivas' knowledge being 'carried off,' this refers only to the ignorance attending their resort to the demonic disposition, not to a loss of their fitness for liberation. Above all, the difference between this verse and the maya teaching is great: here people fail to take refuge from their own fault alone, not because taking refuge is not a means of crossing maya.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the failure to surrender as a matter of grace not yet arrived and of evil company that must be cast off. The lowest of men have lost their birth-fitness by their conduct; such persons are 'brought forth only for the sake of variety,' to fill out the world. Their knowledge, though it arose from the word of the guru, has been borne off by maya, whose very work is the bewilderment of consciousness (cit) and whose power to destroy knowledge is shown by the Devi Purana, where the great maya by force draws away even the minds of those who know. One commentator stresses that the demonic disposition is contracted through company with the asuras who set themselves against the Lord; therefore refuge is to be taken only with the casting off of evil company, a teaching he supports from the Bhagavata. The lifting grace has not yet come to such people.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator reads the verse very compactly: those who, even though the body that is qualified for refuge is present, do not regard the Lord, are doers of evil, the lowest of men, deluded, asuric, and tamasic. He adds a striking note: this very failure is itself 'the glory of maya,' that is, the display of maya's own power.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators read the verse as a diagnosis of why even apparently learned people lack devotion. One reads it as a backward-running negative diagnostic: the absence of bhakti is itself the symptom that maya has stripped the knowledge, which stripping is the fruit of evil deeds, and the demonic disposition is the listed cluster of pride, conceit, anger, and harshness. Two Gaudiya commentators sharpen the point to 'evildoing false scholars,' the wicked yet learned, those who only imagine themselves learned while the truly learned do take refuge. They name four kinds: the deluded, beast-like ritualists who treat the Lord as a mere accessory of ritual; the lowest of men, who, though once devoted, abandon devotion of their own will, thinking practice useless, and whose lowness lies precisely in that self-willed abandonment; those whose knowledge is carried off by maya, who think only the Vaikuntha form of Narayana is worshipful and dismiss the forms of Krishna and Rama as merely human, or who, like the Samkhyas, deny the Lord and credit creation to primordial nature; and those of demonic disposition, who, like the demons that pierced the Lord's body with arrows, tear apart his form by faulty arguments such as that it is merely perceptible or invisible. One Marathi commentator adds that such people, possessed by self-conceit that makes them forget the Self, slacken their sense-control, cease to feel shame at their degeneration, indulge in forbidden acts and vain talk, are surrounded by passions, and lose memory under the blows of sorrow, all rooted in the maya that makes them forget the Lord.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators read the verse in plain ethical and psychological terms. One describes such people as lacking all discrimination between right and wrong and the Real and the unreal: they commit murder, robbery, and theft, speak untruth, injure others, take the body for the Self like the demon Virochana and worship it with fine clothes and foods, and ignorance is named the root cause of all these evils. Another renders the verse as fools and evil-doers whose discernment has been annihilated by maya and who, inspired by an ungodly reason, do not surrender to the Lord. The non-sectarian devotional voice gives a careful anatomy: dushkritis are those who cling with possessiveness (mamata) to perishable things and crave (kamana) what they lack; from blocked craving comes anger, from fulfilled craving greed, and so they fall into forbidden sense-indulgence, deceit, betrayal, and violence; mudhas are dominated by tamas and heed nothing of the essential versus the trivial, the eternal versus the passing, what is to be done versus avoided. Such people are called naradhama, lower than animals, because animals stay within their natural limits while these humans, given a human body precisely in order to reach the Supreme, instead move by sin toward hells and lower births, as Krishna will say in chapter sixteen.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas