Two stages, one traveler: action lifts the climber, stillness holds the one who has arrived.

For the one who has actually climbed into steady meditation.

Shankara reads the yoga being climbed as meditation that, once steady, ripens toward Self-knowledge. The climber's action means duty done with its fruit released, which purifies the mind. For the one truly settled, stillness is a genuine turning-away from all action: the more completely he withdraws, the more his mind gathers, free of strain, master of its own senses, and stands ever more firmly in yoga. Shankara backs this with an outside citation, the Mahabharata's praise of the one who moves, step by step, toward laying down every instrument of harm and withdrawing from action entirely.

For the one who has actually beheld the Self.

Ramanuja names the climbed yoga as the beholding of the Self, and the climber as one who longs for liberation; until the Self is actually seen, he should keep acting. Once mounted and firmly settled, calm, meaning the resting from action, is named as the cause instead. What survives of Ramanuja's own comment states this shift plainly, without spelling out the deeper mechanism, trusting the image of climbing and settling to carry the sense on its own.

For the possessor of direct knowledge, whose residual karma still runs its course.

Madhva distinguishes the climber, whose means is incomplete, from the settled one, the possessor of direct knowledge, whose means is complete, and names the goal spoken of as the cause of the highest happiness. His distinctive claim is that even this settled stillness, read as samadhi, arises fully only once the karma still to be lived through has worn away; until then, the great devotee continues in the Lord's deeds, the muttered Name, and the telling of His story, so stillness does not mean the knower is left with literally nothing to do.

On the reading that bare actionless renunciation does not hold.

The comment attributed to Abhinavagupta here is a single short paragraph, and it is read as exactly that rather than expanded into a full independent treatise. He opens with a proverb, a game without dice, a kingdom without a throne, using it to argue that mere inaction is not real renunciation, so even the wise knower must still act. Action is the cause that brings yoga about, and calm is simply the rest reached once standing on higher ground, with cause functioning here as a defining mark of each stage rather than an active mechanism. A fuller Kashmir Shaiva reading, toward action as consciousness's own free recognition of itself, is plausible on the wider Trika view but is not present in what survives for 6.3, and is not attributed to him here.

For the one whose action has already cleaned the mind.

Sridhara reads the verse as answering the objection that karma-yoga, if so central, must be kept up for a whole lifetime; the word for the climber sets the limit. For the climber, action is named as what lifts him because, in his own phrase, action cleans the mind. For the one already settled and firm in that knowledge, what ripens the knowledge is stillness, understood as deep absorption, specifically the dropping-away of the very actions that would now scatter an already-gathered mind. He resolves the apparent quarrel by ordering the two aids: cleaning first, through action; ripening after, through stillness.

For the one whose scripturally grounded duty has actually borne fruit.

Madhusudana frames the verse as a direct answer to whether worshipful action must be kept up for life, and answers no. The climber, not yet possessed of the calm detachment a purified mind brings, is given scripturally enjoined duties, such as the fire-offering, offered to the Lord, as the means of climbing, a claim he grounds explicitly in the Veda's own authority. Once that detachment is actually gained, the means becomes stillness, the giving-up of all action, which ripens the knowledge already present, a natural completion of the earlier stage rather than a rejection of it.