The seeker who falls from yoga is not lost, but carried up and then set down to begin again.

Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read 'yoga-bhrashta' specifically as a renouncer, a 'sannyasi' who had given up all action and taken up the path of knowledge through the hearing of Vedanta, but who died in the middle without realization. They argue he must be a renouncer and not a ritual performer, because for one still engaged in works the path of yoga does not properly hold, and for one wholly free of longing who has consigned all action to the Lord there would be no occasion for falling at all. So the 'fallen' one is precisely the renouncer in whom old enjoyment-impressions revived and stirred up longing for objects. One reading even identifies the higher world he reaches as the world of Brahma, reached by the path of light, and names figures like Ajatashatru, Janaka, and the like as the kind of great king he is reborn as, one who through the strength of those enjoyment-impressions becomes mighty but unfit, for now, for the renunciation of all action.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the discipline that both wins the higher worlds and arranges the favourable rebirth is one and the same: the 'yoga' the seeker had begun is itself the means to knowledge, and it is 'by the very greatness of that discipline' that he reaches the blessed worlds and, when his thirst for that enjoyment is exhausted, is born into a family fit for taking the discipline up again. One source adds a precise structural note: the yoga already done is not wasted but carries forward as the 'vasana', the formed tendency, that selects the next birth, so the very conditions of that birth are the fruit of the prior practice. This reading also explicitly anticipates the 'param gatim', the supreme goal named a few verses later, as the eventual end of the whole arc, and notes that if the fall came right at the undertaking of the discipline, the rebirth among the pure-and-prosperous is fitted to that.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators frame the route as the patient art of divine grace. The prior 'sukrta', the good already done, makes its own way through the seeker; since he did nothing un-good, he is not made to taste any bad fruit, and the seeker is 'set down at a station favourable to resumption, not punished for the fall'. They read the prefix in 'abhi-jayate', is born, as meaning the birth is granted with affection. Strikingly, they read 'shrimat' not merely as worldly wealth but as those 'endowed with the glory of Bhagavan', that is, devotees, and 'shuchi' as those free of deceit and the like; the reborn seeker, his mind no longer empty of inquiry, even prays for his birth, and the Lord deliberately arranges the next births so his interrupted course is opened a second time. For the 'pushti' devotee this is the visible working of grace, fitting the next birth as a continuation of the broken path.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators read the verse as a fixed, compassionate promise that nothing of the earlier 'shraddha', faith, is wasted: the slipped seeker is first received into the very abodes won by ritual merit and then set down in a home where purity and means are both at hand, so the rebirth is a continuation and not a punishment. One source draws an important distinction the verse implies about who gets this enjoyment-route at all: the fruit of yoga is both liberation and enjoyment, and for the unripe yogi in whom desire for enjoyment still lives, the fall brings enjoyment (this verse), whereas for the fully ripened yogi, in whom such desire is impossible, there is liberation alone; some, however, allow that even a ripened yogi, if by providence desire arises, may take the enjoyment-route, on the analogy of sages like Kardama and Saubhari. Another source paints the reborn life vividly: such a one secures effortlessly what even Indra labors for, grows weary of the unique heavenly enjoyments and longs to return, is reborn into a family rich in piety where the Vedas are his living deity and his own dharma is his code of conduct, and there flourishes like a fresh shoot from a pruned stem.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator gives a compact, distinctive gloss on the verse's terms. The 'everlasting years' are read as the years of the everlasting Vishnu, specified as 'the three Vaishnava years', a particular reckoning of that vast heavenly span. And 'of the pure', shuchinam, is read inwardly: it means those whose mind already touches a portion of the Blessed One, so the purity of the rebirth-family is understood as a real, if partial, contact with the divine rather than merely outer good conduct.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These commentators keep close to the plain sense while drawing out its psychology. One spells out the terms for a new reader: the yoga-bhrashta is one who climbed a certain height on the ladder of yoga but fell through lack of dispassion or slackness, falling victim to Maya or the turbulent senses; the 'righteous' are those who do virtuous, scripturally sanctioned acts; 'everlasting years' means only a very long period, not literally forever; and the 'pure' are those of clean, moral life, free of jealousy, hatred, pride, and greed. Another reads the family plainly as 'pure-minded rich people'. A third draws a sharp contrast in inner state: ordinary merit-doers must labor, plead in prayer, and perform the sacrifices to earn the heavenly worlds, but the yoga-bhrashta, who never aimed at enjoyment in the first place, attains those worlds without that toil, purely through the subtle residual tendency of worldly life; and once there, because pleasure was never his goal, a distaste for those enjoyments forms in him, and he moves through them as through an obstacle, never absorbed in them the way the true pleasure-seeker is.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas