Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 7, Verse 15: Krishna to Arjuna — Jñāna-Vijñāna-Yoga
Evil-doers, the deluded, the lowest of humanity, their knowledge stolen by *māyā*, do not take refuge in Me; they cling instead to a demonic nature.
Bhāṣyakāra purports
- Śaṅkaraadvaita
Wicked-doers (duṣkṛtina — those habituated to evil) and the utterly deluded (mūḍha — those without discriminative intelligence) do not take refuge in Me, the supreme Lord Nārāyaṇa; they are the lowest among humans (narādhama — degraded within the human order). Their very knowledge has been plundered by Māyā — robbed by the power that generates the appearance of multiplicity — so they cling to the demonic disposition (āsura-bhāva) characterised by violence and falsehood. Śaṅkara's gloss is precise: māyā 'apahṛta-jñāna' means the knowledge that scripture and teacher could have awakened has been actively seized and suppressed, leaving the aspirant incapable of the jñāna-mārga that alone reaches the Absolute.
- Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita
Four grades of the wicked fail to surrender: the mūḍha (those with inverted knowledge, clinging to sense-objects as if those objects were self-sufficient rather than modes of Bhagavān); the narādhama (those who nominally know the Lord's form yet are constitutionally unfit for turning toward Him); those whose knowledge of Bhagavān's aiśvarya (lordly majesty) has been stolen away by clever sophistries (kūṭa-yukti); and those in whom that same knowledge of His greatness has been turned into hatred — these last are most deeply demonic. Rāmānuja ranks them in ascending degrees of wickedness (uttarottarāḥ pāpiṣṭhatamāḥ), showing that āsura-bhāva is not one thing but a spectrum culminating in active antagonism to Bhagavān's sovereignty.
- Madhvadvaita
Madhva reads the compound as two linked defects: wickedness (duṣkṛtitva) produces delusion (mūḍhatva), and stolen knowledge (apahṛta-jñānatva) produces the demonic orientation (āsura-bhāva). The theft of knowledge is understood as māyā's overpowering (abhibhava) of the jīva's natural jñāna — Madhva cites the Vyāsa-yoga: 'knowledge is the intrinsic nature of the jīvas; it is overpowered (adhiḥ bhūyate) by māyā.' 'Asura' is glossed etymologically as 'those attached to the prāṇas (asu)' — a permanent category of jīvas for whom devotion to Hari is structurally foreclosed, not merely circumstantially absent.
- Vallabhaśuddhādvaita
Vallabha frames the failure to seek refuge as an obstacle (pratibandha) that is itself dual: bodily and mental faults (kāya-mano-doṣa) captured under āsura-bhāva, and adherence to the Māyāvāda path (māyāvāda-mārge 'bhiniveśa) — which Vallabha names as its own species of demonic orientation. The māyāvādin who denies Bhagavān's personal form is thus grouped with the openly wicked under a single structural category. Viveka — the discriminative certainty (tattva-niścaya) that recognises Kṛṣṇa's personal reality — is precisely what māyā steals, making the individual turn away from Bhagavān's mūrti (bhagavan-mūrti-dveṣin), which the following verses will elaborate.
- Śrīdharabhakti
Śrīdhara offers a clean causal chain: among humans, those who are lowest (narādhama) do not worship (bhajanti) Me — and their degradation has a reason: they are mūḍha (devoid of viveka, discriminative clarity). The root cause of that delusion is being duṣkṛtin (habituated to sin). Because of accumulated sin, even the knowledge that scripture and the teacher (śāstrācārya-upadeśa) had produced in them is taken away (apahṛtam, here glossed as 'displaced' or 'expelled' — nirasta). The result is āsura-svabhāva, characterised by the qualities the text will enumerate in chapter 16: pride (dambha), arrogance (darpa), conceit (abhimāna), wrath (krodha), harshness (pāruṣya).
- Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti
Madhusūdana opens with an affective exclamation — 'what misfortune (daubhāgyam) is theirs!' — before conducting the most psychologically granular analysis of the six. Duṣkṛtin means one in permanent conjunction with sin (duṣkṛtena nityayoginaḥ), making them narādhama in both this life (condemned by the virtuous) and the next (heir to a thousand calamities). They sin because they are mūḍha — incapable of distinguishing welfare from harm. They remain mūḍha because māyā, operating specifically as the delusion of identification with the body-sense aggregate (śarīra-indriya-saṅghāta-tādātmya-bhrānti), has blocked the power of discrimination (viveka-sāmarthya). The result is āsura-bhāva: violence, falsehood, and all the dispositions the Gītā will anatomise — and thus total unfitness for the surrender that would end their misfortune.