Advaita Vedānta

The Advaita reading frames the verse by what these ritualists lack. The desireless worshipper of the Lord is gradually liberated through the purification of being (sattva-shuddhi) and the consequent arising of knowledge. The trai-vidya ritualists, by contrast, act with desire and so never mount the means of knowledge. Lacking the purifier of being, they remain caught in the round of birth and death, experiencing only its sorrow again and again, even though they win heaven in between. The point of the verse, on this reading, is to set the desire-laden ritualist beside the desireless devotee so the difference of destination is clear: heaven that returns, versus knowledge that liberates.

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This school draws a sharp line between the men of the three Vedas and the men of the Vedanta. The trai-vidya are those settled in the three Vedas alone, not those settled in the Vedanta, the end of the Veda. The great souls of the Vedanta know the Lord as the one to be known by the whole Veda, and through their exceedingly great devotion and the sacrifice of knowledge they attain him alone. The trai-vidya path is not condemned; it is a genuine path, but its scope is limited to the circular and the perishable. It yields heaven for the duration of one's merit and then returns the candidate to the mortal circuit, the 'go-and-return' (gata-agata). The inner motive that binds them is named 'desirers of desires' (kama-kama): bound to desires whose fruits are themselves perishable. One who would aim higher must aim past the three-Veda path to the Lord himself, by the singleness of devotion the chapter teaches.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhakti

The bhakti commentators read the verse against the immediately preceding praise of the devotees. The devotees who possess the threefold worship and know the Supreme Lord, Sri Vasudeva, are liberated; but these mere performers of action are not liberated at all. For one who does not worship Vasudeva, whether through non-difference or through difference, the current of birth-and-death is hard to stem. Jnaneshwari develops this most strongly and even paradoxically: although the ritualists drink soma and become the very image of sacrifice, by choosing heavenly enjoyment instead of the Lord who is the goal of all sacrifice, they have in truth earned sin under the cover of merit. He likens them to a wretch who sits in the shade of a wish-fulfilling tree (kalpataru) yet ties a cloth into a begging-bowl and goes out to beg. Heaven won apart from the Lord is, for the wise, a way of misery, however much it counts as happiness beside the misery of hell; only the Lord's own essence brings pure, everlasting bliss.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

Abhinavagupta poses the verse as an objection and its answer. If Brahman can be reached even by outer sacrifice, and if the object of worship in the Agnishtoma is Vasudeva alone (granting this to avoid the doctrine of difference), then why is release not attained by these people? The answer is that they do indeed worship the Lord alone, but by praying for heaven only they cut their own action short, making it measured and bounded by a fruit no larger than heaven, and this because of the weakness of their own being. For that very reason their merit is the kind of thing that turns them back again, so they win a going and a coming. The limit is in the worshipper's narrowed aim, not in the sacrifice itself; the nature of the sacrifice does not by itself produce a return.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Śuddhādvaita

Vallabha reads the verse through the three gunas and the maya-current. The trai-vidya are practised in the three-guna knowledge of the three Vedas and so perform three-guna karma; 'svar-gati,' the way to heaven, stands in for whatever world matches one's particular karma. He cites his school's text to map a whole ladder of outcomes by which guna of person performs which guna of action, the sattvika reaching the svarga-loka, others reaching Meru, the moon-world, the realm of yakshas, the world of ancestors, and so on; and for all of these there is return, karma being reborn again. These desirers of desires undergo going and coming, having fallen on the third and evil path, 'be born here, die,' the path of the flowing of the gunas. Purushottama adds that, not knowing the sacrifices are of the very form of the Lord's command and serve to remove the obstacle to devotion, they ask only for the world of Indra and take their stand in the round of birth and death.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Dvaita

The Dvaita reading takes the verse as the answer to a precise question. Since the Lord had been called the enjoyer of all rites ('I am the rite'), one might ask whether the fruit of the Lord's own followers is therefore simply the same as that of the knowers of the three Vedas. The answer is no. Even though the Lord is everywhere the enjoyer, the worship offered by the Lord's followers wins a fruit that is higher and more excellent than what is gained by those who perform the rites of the three Vedas. So the verses serve to establish that the worship of Krishna is better than the worship of other deities, and that the devotee's reward outranks the ritualist's.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Modern

The modern commentators largely confirm the plain sense and apply it. Tilak reads it straightforwardly: the sinless soma-sacrificers who perform the three-Veda ritual and desire heaven reach Indra's sphere and enjoy the divine pleasures there. Sivananda turns it into a warning for the yoga aspirant: the higher planes tempt the seeker with celestial cars, damsels, nectar, and a wish-fulfilling tree, and the uncautious yogi is swept away, mistakes this for the goal, and falls back to earth when his merit is spent; only the seeker of strong discrimination and dispassion rejects these invitations, knowing heaven's subtle, intense, intoxicating pleasures are as worthless as earthly ones and are still merely sensual. Ramsukhdas explains the human psychology: even the discerning hold the perishable dear, so when they hear the desire-prompted rites and their fruits described in the three Vedas they lose interest in this world's enjoyments and are pulled toward heaven's; he adds a detailed natural account of the soma creeper whose leaves wax and wane with the moon. Gandhi-Desai notes only that we cannot now say with certainty what those ancient sacrifices were or what the soma juice exactly was.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Mahatma Gandhi