Stopping is not the same as being free.

Read as two distinct stages, action first, knowledge after.

Shankara reads action-yoga and knowledge-yoga as genuinely distinct stages held in strict order. Action, rightly performed, purifies the inner organ; that purity lets knowledge dawn; and knowledge alone, once it has arisen, delivers actionlessness with no further step required. Madhusudana's surviving comment narrows the same logic to its bare cause-and-effect form: where the purifying cause is missing, the effect, fitness for knowledge, simply cannot arise, whether the person has refused to act or renounced without that purity.

Read as fruit-free worship, and nothing less, opening inward stillness.

Ramanuja specifies exactly what kind of action does the work: action performed with no eye on reward, offered as worship of the supreme Person. Without such worship, one's beginningless accumulation of sin stays undestroyed and the senses never draw back enough for the standing in the Self to open. What survives of his comment on this verse is brief, but its architecture is unmistakable: worship-as-action comes first, and inward stillness only follows it.

Read as an argument from the very nature of an embodied soul.

Madhva argues that a soul joined to a body is, by nature, always some kind of agent; if release could come from mere non-doing, it would then belong properly to insentient, unmoving things, which is absurd. He adds that a single lifetime of abstention could not exhaust the vast, beginningless store of one's past action in any case. Freedom, for him, comes from knowledge alone, and that knowledge is ripened only by action done without personal desire.

Read from a single surviving fragment, honestly held close to its own words.

What is preserved of Abhinavagupta's comment on this verse is one dense paragraph rather than his fuller treatment elsewhere. What it states is that knowledge does not stand without action, and skillful action does not stand without knowledge, so the two are, on his reading, one single thing; body, speech, and mind are by nature always in motion, so a person is bound to do something. A fuller Kashmir Shaiva reading might extend this toward consciousness's own freedom expressing itself as action, but that further step is not present in the surviving fragment and is not attributed to him here.

Read through the purification of the mind as the hinge of the whole verse.

Sridhara's surviving comment, also a single continuous paragraph, ties the verse to citta-shuddhi: the duties fitting one's own class and stage of life must be performed, because this alone purifies the mind enough for knowledge to rise. Renunciation attempted before that purification, he says, holds no knowledge in it and does not reach freedom. He meets the scriptural praise of renunciation directly, answering it by qualification rather than by denial: only knowledge-bearing renunciation, earned by prior purity, actually counts.

Read as a plain causal claim, restated from Madhusudana's own compact logic.

Stated in more contemporary terms, the underlying argument is simple: an effect cannot arise where its cause is absent. Refusing to take up the purifying work of duty, or renouncing action without the purity that duty alone earns, leaves the same cause missing either way. There is no shortcut through mere stopping, because stopping was never the cause the goal actually depends on.