He does not hate what rises in him, nor long for what has gone.

Grounded in seeing these rising states as unreal, like a dream.

Madhusudana gives a precise reason for the non-reaction: certainty that these states are false, like a dream. The risen effects are, by their nature, sorrow, and yet unhated; the ceased effects are, by their nature, happiness, and yet uncraved, because their very reality has been seen through. On this reading the stillness is not achieved by discipline or by suppressing a reaction that would otherwise arise. It is simply what is left once a person stops believing these passing states are real enough to matter.

A brief, honest remark, without further doctrine layered on here.

Ramanuja's surviving comment at this verse is compact, and it deserves to be read as compact rather than expanded past what it says. Light, engagement, and delusion are the qualities' effects; he neither hates them when they arrive as unwelcome, nor craves them when they depart though they had been welcome. That is the whole of what this comment states. His larger teaching of the Lord as inner ruler, and of action offered as worship, belongs to other verses; it is not developed here, and it would not be honest to read it into this one.

Free toward the gross qualities, but genuinely still drawn to the subtle.

Madhva will not let the evenness stand as total. He reads the qualities in two grades, gross and subtle. Toward the gross, ordinary effects, the gunatita is, for the most part, free of both aversion and desire, though even here not absolutely, since the residue of past action can still stir a reaction. But toward the subtle grade, whose object is the Lord, real longing remains: he wants subtle sattva, and he casts off, even hates, the thick tamas that intrudes on him. Citing the Bhallaveya branch of the Samaveda and the Moksha-dharma, Madhva reads the freed one as positively drawn toward the Lord, never merely neutral.

A brief fragment, honestly held apart from any larger doctrine.

What survives of Abhinavagupta's comment here is short. Light and its companion effects are present in everything without exception; the yogins steady in union neither cling to them nor come to hate them, holding instead that these belong only to the body and have no power to touch the one who knows himself apart from it. That is what the fragment itself says. It would be tempting to connect this to his larger teaching that awareness is the self's own unbounded freedom, and a reader steeped in that system might reasonably extend it that way, but this page keeps that extension clearly labeled as extension, since the surviving words at this verse do not make that connection explicit.

A finer return to ground already opened once, in Chapter 2.

Sridhara notices that this very question was already raised and answered once, in Chapter 2's teaching on the person of steady wisdom. Arjuna knows this and asks again anyway, wanting finer detail, and Sridhara reads what follows as a fresh unfolding across six verses, of which this is the first. He is exact about the texture of the freed man's experience: in the working of these states he feels no pain and so no aversion, and in their ceasing no pleasure-driven longing. This evenness itself, more than any visible sign, is what Sridhara takes the verse to be naming.

Read as a shift in conviction, not a technique of control.

Read for a contemporary ear, Madhusudana's insight travels well: the stillness this verse describes is not a discipline of gritted-teeth suppression, holding a reaction down by force each time it threatens to rise. It is what is left once a person no longer believes these mental weather patterns, clarity, drive, confusion, are substantial enough to be worth hating or craving. The management of reaction becomes unnecessary once the reaction's object is seen as insubstantial.