Content with what comes, steady in the pairs, he acts and is not bound.

Read as the renunciant already settled in knowledge of the actionless Self.

You are no doer at all. Others, going by appearances, lay doership on you when you beg or move about to sustain your body, but by your own direct experience, grounded in scripture and knowledge, you do nothing whatever; the qualities of nature simply move among themselves. The action that would bind, together with the craving that caused it, has already been burned up by the fire of knowledge, so nothing remains that could bear fruit. This restates, from a fresh angle, what was already established two verses before.

For the karma-yogi still walking the path of action, not yet standing in knowledge.

You are framed here as still engaged in the world's duties, bearing cold and heat without resentment, and staying even through the winning and losing of war and other obligations, for as long as your discipline has yet to complete. None of this asks you to stop acting or feel nothing; it asks only that desire and aversion loosen their grip on the deed. By this very action, evenly done, even before you have reached a standing in knowledge, you are not bound and do not fall back into birth. The deed done this way is already sufficient, not a lesser stage awaiting something else.

Where the surviving note is thin, naming only which words carry which trait.

What is actually preserved here is narrow: your unsought contentment is named by one phrase, your evenness past the pairs by another, and the fragment does not go on to argue why either one frees you. Read alongside the wider architecture Madhva builds elsewhere in this chapter, one would expect this evenness to be framed as the fitting posture of a soul wholly dependent on the Lord's will for the very capacity to act and to receive what comes. But that fuller claim belongs to his broader system, not to this verse's own terse remark, and is offered here honestly as an extension rather than as his stated word.

On the reading that bondage is something you do to yourself.

The phrase even acting, he is not bound turns reflexive here: you bind yourself, by your own self, through taking on the residue left behind by longing for the fruit. Lifeless action carries no independent power of its own to reach back and chain you; if binding happens at all, it is self-imposed. This is why releasing the craving is enough, on its own, to release the one who was clinging.

A close, term-by-term definition rather than an extended argument.

Each trait is defined with some precision: your unsought gain is exactly a gain not sought, your passing beyond the pairs is an active capacity to bear cold and heat rather than mere numbness to them, your freedom from envy is freedom from enmity, and your evenness in outcome is the plain absence of elation or dejection. Holding all four while you perform the duty proper to your station, you simply do not incur bondage; the conclusion follows from the definitions themselves.

The renunciant's ordinary, daily circumstance of living on chance.

You live on whatever chance brings because scripture itself rules out contriving for your needs by begging or scheming; what you receive that way, you rest content with. Hunger, cold, and the rest still arise, but your direct knowing of the Self, which is bliss itself, neither doer nor enjoyer, washes out their sting before it can unsettle your mind. And when you walk the alms-round, an action that looks, to onlookers, exactly like ordinary begging, you are not its doer in your own experience; that role is laid onto you only from outside.