Yoga is hard for the unrestrained mind, but reachable for the one who keeps striving.

Read as speaking even to one who already has discriminative knowledge.

Shankara reads the verse as Krishna's direct reply to Arjuna's fear of falling from the path with an unsteady mind: practice and dispassion move a person from unrestrained to mastered, and it is only the mastered, still-striving mind that reaches yoga's true fruit. Madhusudana takes this further. Even a person who already has the realization born of discrimination may find the mind still moving, stirred by past action already ripening into fruit. Such a knower, so long as the mind is unstilled, is only the lesser yogin; the one in whom even those ripened movements are stilled by sustained effort is liberated while living, the highest yogin. Citing the sage Vasishtha, this reading holds that effort can steer the stream of mental impressions, which runs by a bright path and a dark path, onto the bright one, powerful enough to overpower even strong, already-ripening action, since otherwise ordinary human undertakings like farming or ritual would never bear fruit at all.

Read as worship rather than bare willpower.

Ramanuja specifies what 'the right means' actually is: not a new technique, but the very path of action already taught, worship of the Lord carrying knowledge of the Self within it. The yoga that becomes attainable through this is the discipline of seeing alike, the even vision of the self in all things. On this reading, mastering the mind is not a private feat of concentration; it grows directly out of offering one's striving to the Lord as worship, so that the greatness of the path of action, already praised a few verses earlier as never wasted, is precisely what this verse cashes out.

Read from the one preserved line, honestly kept brief.

What survives from Madhva at this verse is a single compressed statement, so this reading stays close to it. His point: the mind is never held still by itself. He grounds this in a scriptural text that denies release to those who lack the wish for the good, who hate the Lord, and who do not believe. On this evidence, the taming of the mind is bound up with a person's disposition toward the Lord rather than achieved by self-power alone, though the source does not develop further, for this particular verse, how striving and dependence on the Lord relate in detail.

Read from a spare, fragmentary gloss, with any fuller theology clearly flagged as extrapolation.

What remains of Abhinavagupta's comment here is a brief, largely definitional gloss: the unrestrained self is one who has not let go of craving, the mastered self has given up craving, striving means keeping up the practice, and the means are the methods laid down in scripture. It does not, in what survives, unfold a distinctly Kashmir-Saiva account of the self's spontaneous freedom at this verse. On a Kashmir-Saiva reading, one might extend this further, treating craving as the very contraction of the self's native freedom into an anxious, bounded seeker, so that renouncing craving releases rather than diminishes that freedom. That extension is offered here explicitly as a conditional reading, not as something the surviving fragment itself states.

Read as a precise, minimal restatement rather than an elaborated argument.

Sridhara's surviving comment on this verse is a single compact paragraph that tracks the verse's own words closely: the mind not brought under control by practice and dispassion makes yoga impossible; the mind mastered by that same practice and dispassion, still making effort, makes yoga possible. His preserved phrase draws the line as sharply as anything gathered here: the yoga is not in principle out of reach, only out of reach to the unprepared. The material available does not extend into his fuller devotional register found elsewhere, so this reading stays with what he actually left us.

Read for its practical, psychological shape.

Read against Madhusudana's fuller argument, a modern-facing reading draws out its most usable claim: effort is a real technology for redirecting entrenched momentum, not merely for restraining a stray impulse in the moment. The mind's stream of past impressions runs by two paths, and sustained, rightly applied effort is what steers it onto the better one, strong enough even to outweigh action already bearing fruit. What separates the lesser yogin from the highest is not the presence of knowledge but whether that redirection has actually been done.