Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 6, Verse 4: Krishna to Arjuna — Dhyāna-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  When the contemplating yogin no longer clings — neither to sense-objects (śabda and the rest) nor to any action, whether obligatory, occasional, or prohibited — not from exhaustion but from having perceived their purposelessness, and when the renunciation of all volition (sarva-saṃkalpa-sannyāsa) has become his very disposition, he is declared 'mounted on yoga' (yogārūḍha). Śaṅkara insists that sankalpa is the root of all desire: 'desire arises from volition, volition alone is the seed of action' (Manusmṛti 2.3 cited in bhāṣya). Therefore the renunciation of all saṃkalpas entails the renunciation of all action and all desire simultaneously — not as sequential steps but as one cognitive event.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  When this yogin, whose very nature (svabhāva) is the exclusive experience of the self (ātmaikānubhava), no longer clings to the natural sense-objects that belong to prakṛti or to actions related to them, he is then called yogārūḍha — one who has fully renounced all sankalpa. Rāmānuja draws the practical corollary at once: for the aspirant (ārurukṣu) who desires to ascend to this state, the practice of non-attachment to sense-experience is itself karma-yoga, not a preliminary to it. The yogin's detachment is not nihilistic vacancy but the positive pull of ātma-experience crowding out everything else.

• Madhvadvaita

  Madhva marks this verse as the definition of the yogārūḍha's characteristic: proper non-attachment (samyag-ananusaṅga) belongs to such a one alone. He notes tersely that for others genuine non-attachment can arise only through great effort, whereas for the advanced devotee it is natural — 'dissolution of faults arises spontaneously in him; in others only through striving' (svato doṣalayo dṛṣṭvā tv itareṣāṃ prayatnataḥ, cited in bhāṣya). The jīva's irreducible distinctness from Hari means that clinging to prakṛti-objects is always a fall away from one's true dependent nature (pāratantrya); yogārūḍha is the recovery of that nature.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Vallabha's gloss is deliberately compressed: the yogārūḍha does not cling even to actions that are properly his own (sva-kriyā-nirvartyeṣv api karmasv). This is the Puṣṭi-mārga's characteristic accent — even dutiful ritual action, if owned rather than surrendered as Kṛṣṇa's prasāda, becomes a subtle form of ahaṃkāra (the 'I' as doer). Yogārūḍha is not the man without action but the man without the possessiveness of action; everything flows as divine gift, nothing is grasped as one's own production.

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Śrīdhara answers the implied question — what does yogārūḍha actually look like? — by pointing to the inner condition behind the outward signs: when attachment to sense-pleasures (śabdādi) and to the actions that procure them is absent, and when the habitual renunciation of all volitions (saṃkalpas) directed at objects of enjoyment and acquisition has become character (śīla), then and only then is one called yogārūḍha. He identifies the causal logic cleanly: saṃkalpa is the root of attachment; uproot the saṃkalpa-habit and non-attachment is its natural fruit, not an act of will.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Madhusūdana ties the yogārūḍha's non-attachment to a double vision: seeing the unreality (mithyātva) of sense-objects on the one hand, and seeing the self as non-doer, non-enjoyer, pure bliss-non-dual (akartṛ-abhokṭṛ-paramānanda-advaya) on the other. These two sights together remove the ahiṃkāra-formed clinging (abhiniveśa-rūpa anuṣaṅga) that is the real obstacle to yoga-ascent. His synthesis: Advaita supplies the ontological diagnosis; Kṛṣṇa-bhakti supplies the affective warmth that makes the non-dual vision livable. The verse's 'sarva-saṃkalpa-sannyāsī' names the one in whom this double vision has become stable disposition.