Filled by what he has learned and what he has lived, the yogi finds gold and dirt weigh the same.

Read as the portrait of the supreme renunciant whose knowing ends in non-duality.

Shankara and, following him, Madhusudana Sarasvati read this yogi as the paramahamsa, the wandering monk of the highest dispassion. His vijnana is the making of scripture's teaching, that the self is one with Brahman, into his own immediate, felt experience. The equal regard for clod, stone, and gold is, on this reading, not a discipline layered on top of an otherwise ordinary mind; it is the simple absence of the faculty that used to divide the world into things to be taken and things to be left, a faculty that has itself dissolved into the one seeing that remains.

Read as the self grasped as distinct in kind from matter.

Ramanuja reads vijnana as the vision that grasps the self as a distinct kind of being, wholly apart from prakriti, matter itself. Once the mind is settled there, clod, stone, and gold no longer carry the character of objects to be enjoyed; they simply become of equal use, no more, no less. He treats this fullness of knowledge as the very cause of the sense-conquest already named, and calls the one so filled fit, at last, for the deeper discipline of directly beholding the self.

Drawn honestly from the passage Madhva shares between 6.7 and 6.8.

Madhva's own surviving comment treats these two verses as one continuous statement, and its full text is given at the verse before this one; nothing separate survives here about the clod, the stone, and the gold specifically. What it does say is that the conquered self grows wholly calm, no longer running out to objects, so that the supreme Self becomes well-set and near in the heart, known directly rather than merely known about. He glosses vijnana as knowledge of the Lord's own particular traits, and kutastha as standing fixed like a mountain peak, unmoved by whatever moves around it.

Only a brief gloss survives; a fuller reading is offered here as flagged extrapolation.

What survives from Abhinavagupta on this verse is a single terse sentence: jnana is the unerring intellect, vijnana is that same knowledge grown manifold in action. That is genuinely all the extant fragment says. Extended conditionally, on a fuller Kashmir Shaiva reading, one might treat this unerring discernment as recognition, pratyabhijna, of one's own nature as consciousness itself, so that equal regard for clod and gold would mark a mind no longer contracted into a bounded, grasping self. But that extension is this reading's own inference, not Abhinavagupta's stated words, and it is named as such rather than offered as his own voice.

Read as a chain where each mark follows causally from the one before it.

Sridhara reads the verse as closing the portrait of the yoga-arudha through a chain of cause and effect: satisfied by jnana and vijnana, the mind becomes nirakanksha, free of further longing; from that freedom comes kutastha, changelessness; from that comes the conquest of the senses; and from that, finally, clod, stone, and gold become sama, equal, because the intellect that once sorted the world into grasp and reject has itself fallen still. The wider devotional tradition around him renders this vividly, picturing a mountain of gold and a tiny clod of earth held in either hand and found to weigh exactly the same.

Read as a practical test rather than an imposed rule.

Madhusudana's account of vijnana as insight made plain through one's own reflection, until every doubt about the taught truth falls away, suggests a workable test for ordinary life: does the pull of gold over dirt survive being looked at honestly, or does it depend on an unexamined craving that a clear enough seeing simply starves of its fuel? Read this way, the sameness described is not a rule to impose on the senses from outside, but the settled result of a mind that has stopped needing any particular object to feel complete.