Advaita Vedānta

The Advaita reading frames the failure as contempt for the Lord who is one's own Self: by slighting him, a person slights what he most truly is, so his fire-oblations and his knowledge alike turn fruitless. The deluding demonic and ungodly nature is the disposition that holds the body to be the Self. Several in this school sharpen the consequence: the obstruction of discriminating knowledge comes from a great sin born of reviling the Lord, and through the gateway of hell (desire, anger, and greed) such people undergo the suffering of hell, even said to be fit to dwell there long. One adds that knowledge which treats only of Brahman is what bears fruit, while knowledge from books that deny the Self is the empty kind named here.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This school reads the offense as a perverse misjudgment of the Lord in his human descent: the deluding nature conceals his supreme compassion and other qualities present in his manhood, so that people hold him, the Lord of all, to be merely equal to others. Because their estimate of him is wrong, their knowledge is perverse with regard to everything, the moving and unmoving world and the Lord himself, and so whatever they wish or undertake toward him becomes vain. The triple vainness, on this reading, exhausts the whole field of a life and follows as a cascade from one bad inner appraisal of who the Lord is.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

The Dvaita reading takes the failure as the settled fruit for haters of the Lord: nothing they hope for is attained, and no liberation comes to them even through devotion offered to other gods such as Brahma or Rudra; for them there is no recourse at all. This school then resolves a scriptural puzzle at length. If texts say enemies like Shishupala reached the Lord's state through hatred, this does not make hatred a path to liberation. Those figures were eternal attendants of Vishnu, devotees before their fall, who became haters only by the force of a curse; the Lord, prizing devotion, grants them the fruit of their former love, not of their hatred. That former attendantship is given as the very answer to how a hater attained liberation, which shows hatred itself is no means; the many texts prohibiting hatred, backed by reasoning and consonant with the Vedas' great purport (the supreme excellence of the Lord's qualities), outweigh the few statements of likeness. The verse then states the cause of the hatred as the rakshasa nature.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

This school presses past mere ignorance, since not-knowing is common to everyone, to a specific corruption. Hopes are vain because heaven, the deities, and even reward taken apart from the Lord are themselves empty; or because such people hold that karma alone, without the Lord, bestows fruit. Their knowledge is the 'asuri' knowledge born of the teachings of mayavada and the like, spoken in bewildering scriptures that do not have the Lord's own form for their object. The natures taken refuge in are read with precision: a rakshasi nature whose form is feeding one's own belly and genitals, an asuri nature whose form is harming others, and a deluding human nature that is maya itself, the very nature that makes one forget the Lord. It is for just this reason that, seeing him as merely a man-form, they set him at nought.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This reading is terse and gives a single root cause: action, knowledge, and longing are all fruitless because each has an unreal thing for its object. The 'asuric and rakshasa' natures simply name those in whom the qualities of rajas and tamas have grown excessive. The emptiness, on this account, is a matter of the object being unreal rather than of any further machinery of sin or rebirth.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhedabheda

This reading is compact: hopes, deeds, and knowledge are vain, the deeds (fire-offering and the rest) futile and the knowledge futile because it is directed to what is not the Self. 'Vichetas' means lacking discrimination, and the nature resorted to is a fiendish, dark, tamasic one. It then turns immediately to the contrasting verse on the great souls who take refuge in the divine nature.

Śrī Bhāskara

Bhakti

The devotional reading binds the three failures tightly as cause and effect flowing from turning away from the Lord, and the Gaudiya voices add a striking point: this collapse strikes even those who outwardly look successful. Even if they are devotees, their hope of reaching the Lord's realm is vain; even if they are doers of ritual, their hope of heaven is vain; even if they are men of knowledge studying Vedanta, they do not come to know liberation, the fruit of knowledge. The reason given is the sin of disregarding the supreme Brahman who has taken a human-seeming form, thinking that form material; one cites scripture warning that whoever holds Krishna's body to be material is to be shunned. One vivid Marathi telling likens such lives to clouds in a rainless sky, a mirage, a juggler's ornaments, a tall hollow tree that bears no fruit: appearing to exist yet empty, with delusion as a demon gripping the mind so reason cannot reach it.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

The modern commentators render the verse plainly and draw out its working. Hopes are vain because they are placed in perishable, transient forms and so miss the Eternal; action is vain when not offered as sacrifice to the Lord, since deeds are insentient and cannot dispense their own rewards, only the all-knowing Lord can; knowledge from books that deny the Self bears no fruit, while only learning that treats of Brahman does. One develops the economics of it: even scripturally sanctioned acts (yajna, dana) done with selfish, fruit-seeking intent have a beginning and an end, so one rises to high worlds only to return to birth and death, spending one's time and intelligence and gaining nothing, above all missing the very purpose for which a human body was given. He carefully limits the verdict: only such selfish ritual is empty; acts done for the Lord and offered to him are not fruitless but become 'sat', truth-bearing and imperishable.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas