Every disposition of beings, fame and infamy alike, arises from the Lord alone.

Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as straightforward ontology grounded in non-difference. The states arise from the Lord alone because, as one source puts it, they have in no way any existence apart from the Self; this is why 'from Me alone' is said. The variety among beings is explained entirely by each creature's own past action. From this they draw a devotional conclusion that the Lord, as the great Lord of all the worlds and the single ground of every disposition, is therefore the refuge to be taken for the highest gain, for both enjoyment and liberation. The catalogue is treated as a complete list (one source counts twenty states) whose every item, bright or otherwise, has a single source.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri

Bhakti

This reading stresses a point about the dark qualities. Hearing the second half of the catalogue as completing the first, this commentator notes that the Lord owns not only the bright qualities but, as their causal ground, the dark ones too, including ill fame and the contrary dispositions. The reasoning given is that the very ground of the loka (the world) cannot be partial; if the Lord is the cause of all, He must be the cause of the whole range, not merely the pleasant half.

Śrīdhara Svāmī

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read 10.4 and 10.5 together as one unfolding of the twenty bhavas, and they color every term with explicit reference to the Lord. One re-reads each quality as Krishna-directed: ahimsa as mercy, samata as the same disposition toward the Lord on every side, tushti as the contentment that abides ever in His being, tapas as the bearing of pain for His sake, dana as the giving of His own teaching, yasha as the good repute that comes from being His servant. The same source adds a striking distinction: for those marked by the Lord's grace, who know Him, these states all become the bright buddhi-and-the-rest qualities; for the others, only the fourfold dark sort, including ill fame and sorrow, comes about. The devotional point drawn is that every good quality is a permission to see and worship the Lord's own portion afresh, not a bare psychological fact arising of itself.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Dvaita

These commentators comment very narrowly here, glossing only the single word tushti (contentment) as 'the sense of having enough,' supported by lexical authority. One notes that the broader meaning has already been covered under the word for happiness in the preceding verse, so only contentment needs fresh explanation. They offer no separate treatment of the verse's larger claim about the Lord as source, treating it as continuous with what came before.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Modern

These commentators add interpretive frames of their own. One reads the bhavas through Samkhya philosophy, where the conditions of Reason (an evolute of Prakriti, primordial nature) lodged in the subtle body account for the various births a soul takes, while noting that Vedanta finally traces the whole visible universe, embodied in Maya, back to the mental states of the Parabrahman, the one permanent Principle beyond Matter and Spirit; austerity and charity here are to be understood as states of mind, frames of faith. Another dwells at length on contentment as the true wealth that annihilates greed, observing that greed makes even a rich man a beggar while contentment brings peace of mind. A third, commenting on the list more generally, stresses that the discriminating knowledge named in the sequence has been received by every human being from the Lord.

Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Swami Sivananda