The battle is already won; you are only asked to be its instrument.

Read with precise attention to who is the doer and who is the means.

Hold the categories of agency exactly, as Ramanuja does. To be a mere instrument is to be not the true doer but the means, the equivalent of a weapon, through which the Lord, the real doer, accomplishes the slaying of those already given over to death as wrongdoers. The kingdom you are to enjoy is, on this reading, a lawful one, fitted into a moral order rather than simple spoil, and the whole prior teaching of the Gita gathers here into one practical command.

Adjacent to the devotional reading, where the instrument's role is itself a gift.

The line most associated elsewhere in this chapter with the path of grace, that being an instrument is not a shrinking but a dignity, finds its ground here in Sridhara's own reading rather than a separate voice: to be named nimitta-matra is treated as the very thing that frees the devotee to act, the burden of doership set down so that only the office of the instrument, undiminished, remains.

Honest silence, and only a labeled extension beyond it.

Madhva left no comment on this verse. Nothing in his own voice can honestly be reported here. If one extends his known commitments conditionally, a Dvaita reading would likely treat the already-decided slaying as each warrior meeting an end suited to his own eternally distinct nature, sinner and hero alike receiving what their nature and deeds have made them fit for, with Arjuna's instrumenthood a small, dependent part of a larger, sovereign order. This is a marked extrapolation, not his word.

A secret the source itself says is only sketched.

Abhinavagupta leaves a terse remark rather than a developed teaching: this, he says, is the chapter's secret, in which the world of knowledge and ignorance is swallowed by an awareness that is pure, impure, and mixed, only sketched here, merely touched upon. What he does say plainly is that Krishna's words answer Arjuna's own earlier confession that he did not know which course was weightier. A fuller reading of instrumenthood as the self's right place within one consciousness would have to be offered as an extension beyond what he actually wrote, not as his settled doctrine.

Read as the resolution of the moral crisis where Arjuna feared being the killer.

This is, for Sridhara, the exact answer to the anguish of the first chapter. There Arjuna feared being the killer; here he is told he is not being asked to kill at all, only to be the visible vehicle of a killing already done by the Lord as the time-form. The doership he shrank from claiming has now been openly returned to the Lord, and the devotee is freed to fight precisely by being freed from doership.

How to receive an outcome that was never fully yours to author.

Read against Madhusudana's insistence that fame here is real, the fruit of a genuinely great deed, a modern-facing gloss draws out the practical instruction: receive success the way these warriors are received into their already-decided end, as something arriving through a wider order rather than through private authorship alone, and let that be enough to prevent the quiet swelling that says, this victory was mine alone.