A happiness past every limit waits within, and once known, it does not let go.

Read as Brahman's own bliss, truly tasted rather than merely blank.

This happiness is the very nature of Brahman, tasted by an intellect cleansed into steady sattva. It resembles the state of deep sleep in lying beyond the senses, but the resemblance stops there: in deep sleep the intellect itself dissolves and nothing is known, while here the settled intellect remains present, so the bliss is genuinely tasted, not merely absent disturbance. And there is a caution worth carrying: do not turn this bliss into something watched by thinking 'I am enjoying this great happiness'. That very thought is an outward movement of mind, and it is the reflecting, not the happiness, that must be set down.

Read as the self's own complete happiness, not identity with an absolute.

This is the individual self's own boundless happiness, found only once the understanding turns fully toward the self and stops running out after everything around it. It is not a merger into a featureless whole; it stays the self's own joy, tasted directly within the very discipline that produced it. The steadiness that follows is nothing mysterious: a happiness this complete leaves nothing else in the world worth reaching for.

Honest about a thin source: one line, kept to what it actually says.

What survives from Madhva on this verse is brief: this happiness, he says, is in truth of the form of the Lord. Kept to its own terms, that line still does real work, since it keeps even this deepest inward joy dependent on Hari rather than self-originating. Any further reading of how this bears on the verse's closing phrase is offered only as a flagged, reasoned extension of his broader teaching, not as his own developed word on 6.21.

Read from a passage shared across several verses, not 6.21 alone.

Abhinavagupta's fuller comment, where it survives, covers this verse together with the three around it as one passage anchored at the one before it. Within that passage he does speak to this happiness directly: the mind drawn back rests by itself, and one knows the highest happiness because objects no longer arise to stir and cloud it; such a one is not shaken in any deep way. A further framing of this as consciousness recognizing its own free nature is marked here as a conditional extension, since no comment addressed to 6.21 alone has survived.

Read as answering the natural objection: no senses, so where's the joy from?

This meets the doubt a careful listener would already be forming: if there is no contact at all between the senses and their objects here, where could any happiness possibly come from? The answer given is that this happiness belongs to the self itself, grasped only by an intellect that has taken on the self's own form. It neither lends nor borrows; it stands entirely of itself, and it is what the world's ordinary pleasures have only ever imitated, without letting on that they were imitations.

Read as a practical distinction between real absorption and mere blankness.

The weight here falls on telling two things apart that are easy to confuse: the bare quieting of the senses, which on its own could look like simple blankness, and a positive, directly felt happiness that remains once that quieting happens. The caution against making the bliss into a watched, narrated experience becomes a practical warning for any contemplative practice: the moment you step back to observe and name what you are feeling, you have already left the very absorption you meant to describe.