Know the self and Nature truly, and no way of living can undo your freedom.

For the one in whom this realization has actually dawned and who still visibly acts.

You might object: surely the actions from before this knowledge arose, across this life and countless past lives, plus whatever is done afterward, must still bear fruit somewhere. The answer rests on the image of burnt seeds. Actions sprout future births only when they are rooted in ignorance and desire and tied to a personal 'I' with its aims; once knowledge burns that root away, the seeds remain in form but cannot sprout again, the way roasted seeds never grow. One exception is kept. The action that already set this present body going is like an arrow already shot: it must complete its flight and only then come to rest, so this life continues to its natural end. But you, the knower, are untouched through all of it, standing as its mere witness rather than its author.

Recovered from the words actually attached to this exact claim, sitting at the verse just before this one.

Clear discernment of the person from Nature, once genuine, makes the self simply unfit to remain joined to Nature any longer, however afflicted the body it presently occupies. The freedom is immediate and unconditional; it does not wait on some further stage. When that body ends, the self reaches its own unbounded nature, since it was never, in truth, identical with what it had mistaken for itself. Outer conduct was never the operative cause, in either direction.

Honestly marked as absent in the source, with only a labeled, conditional extension offered in its place.

No comment from Madhva survives on this exact verse, and nothing should be presented here as his settled word. Held loosely, as a guess consistent with his system elsewhere rather than a citation from this line: since he treats every capacity of the self, to know and to act, as dependent on the Lord's sanction, a Madhva-consistent reading would likely cast even this freedom as grace working through right understanding, the self remaining dependent still, even at the point of liberation.

Read with the freeing knowledge taken as a single, undivided vision.

The knowledge that frees is the vision of Brahman whose very form is the absence of all difference. By that non-dual seeing, Nature, the person, and the qualities are known together, as one undivided reality, not as separate pieces reconciled afterward. However you conduct yourself once this vision has arisen, you are freed all the same, because the freedom named here was never a reward attached to any particular shape of life.

Read as compact praise for the one who has reached this exact discernment.

Krishna praises here the one who has come to know Nature and the self as genuinely different. The self is known under the form of the mere witness, the one who simply looks on; Nature is known as bound up with her own changes, pleasure and pain among them. Such a person is freed, simply, even while stepping past every outer rule that would ordinarily bind, because the discernment itself, once real, is the whole of what frees him.

Read as an operation on ignorance, never on the shape of a life.

What this verse actually removes is a single causal link, the one running from ignorance to the sense of a bound, embodied self. The deed and the life built around it are never themselves the target. This is why unconventional conduct changes nothing about whether one is freed, and why the verse quietly closes its own loophole: if freedom holds for one whose conduct varies without limit, it holds all the more for one who keeps, without strain, to ordinary and settled ways.