Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 13, Verse 9: Krishna to Arjuna — Kṣetra-Kṣetrajña-Vibhāga-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  Non-attachment (asakti) is the mental posture of vairagya — dispassion toward all sensory objects, seen and unseen. Non-clinging (anabhisvanga) to son, wife, and house means refusing the deeper enmeshment that follows mere contact — seeing birth as the passage through the womb-door, death as the severance of all vitality, old age as the suppression of intelligence and radiance, disease as fever and flux: each a defect, repeatedly contemplated. This repeated seeing of defect (dosa-anudarsana) is itself called jnana because it produces vairagya toward body and sense-objects and turns the instruments inward toward the Self.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  Non-attachment (asakti) means being without clinging (sanga-rahitatva) toward everything that is not the Self; non-clinging (anabhisvanga) to son, wife, and house means no embrace of them beyond their sanctioned function as instruments of scriptural duty (sastriya-karma-upakarana). Constant equanimity (sama-cittatva) at desired and undesired events — those arising from one's own willing — is the absence of elation (harsa) and agitation (udvega). These qualities free the practitioner's inner faculty for undivided kainkarya, service to Bhagavan.

• Madhvadvaita

  *Asakti* (non-attachment) and *anabhiṣvaṅga* (non-clinging) toward sons, wives, home, and the rest, together with *sama-cittatva* (equanimity of mind) at the arrival of the desired and the undesired — these are named among the constituents of *jñāna*. For the *paratantra* *jīva* (the eternally dependent individual self), sons, wife, and household belong to the *svatantra* (the independently real, self-sufficient) Lord's dispensation alone; the *jīva* holds no proprietary claim over them. *Asakti* is not mere affective flatness but the *jīva*'s recognition that *bheda* (real distinction) between itself and the objects of *saṃsāra* is not dissolved by proximity. *Anabhiṣvaṅga* — the absence of deep entanglement — follows from that same *bheda*: the *jīva* cannot fuse with what is ontologically other. *Sama-cittatva* at *iṣṭa-aniṣṭa-upapatti* (the arrival of the desired and the undesired) is not indifference but *taratamya*-ordered submission: what Hari ordains in the *pañca-bheda* (the five-fold real distinction among Lord, *jīva*, and matter) scheme cannot be deflected by the *jīva*'s preference. Grasping what Hari grants or recoiling from what Hari withholds would be the *jīva*'s false assertion of *svatantra* — a negation of *paratantra* existence. *Sama-cittatva* is therefore the behavioral expression of correct ontological self-knowledge: the *jīva* stands in *bhakti* (devotion) as ontological subordination, receiving both *iṣṭa* and *aniṣṭa* as the Lord's own ordering of a dependent being's condition.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Vallabha's comment is a single pointer — 'indriyrthesv iti — visayesu' — with no elaboration; detailed Pustimarga bhāṣya is absent here. From Pustimarga principles: the practitioner does not cling to son, wife, or house because all of these are Krishna's lila-prasada, held in trust and returned at his will. Non-attachment is not cold renunciation but the lightness of one who knows the owner; equanimity at desired and undesired events is the fruit of seeing every event as Krishna's sport, beyond the devotee's approval or protest.

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Sridhara reads the verse economically: non-attachment and non-clinging are the outer and inner faces of the same vairagya. Repeated contemplation (punah-punar-alocana) of birth, old age, disease, and death as duhkha-dosa — the defect-that-is-suffering — is what gives the practitioner genuine equanimity at pleasant and unpleasant arrivals. The rest, Sridhara notes, is clear (spastam anyat): the verse lists qualities; the practice of seeing samsara as suffering is the engine behind them.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Vairagya is not mere withdrawal but a mental movement (cittivrtti) that is asprhata — free of craving — toward sensory objects both immediate and promised in scripture. Non-clinging (anabhisvanga) goes further: even the latent pride 'I am supreme among all' (aham sarvotkrista) that rises unbidden in the mind — that is the ahankara whose absence is here required. Madhusudana enumerates: birth with its womb-passage, death with its severance of all tender parts, old age with its diminishment of wisdom, strength and radiance, disease with its fever and flux, suffering with its three-fold causation — all are defects, to be turned over again and again (punah-punar-alocana), burning out the attachment that obstructs atma-darsana. These twenty qualities together constitute jnana; none alone suffices.