The same steady regard for well-wisher and foe, and for everyone in between

Advaita Vedānta

These commentators take the equal mind almost wholly as the absence of any sorting impulse. The yogi's buddhi is simply not occupied with the questions of who a person is by class and lineage, and what he does by activity; he is everywhere free of attachment and aversion. The two readings of the final word, that he is the best of yogis or that he is released from all faults, are both preserved, and the equanimity is presented as a further limb of yoga that secures the highest fruit. The stress is on an inner mind emptied of partiality, without building any larger metaphysical apparatus around it.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the equality is grounded in a specific reason: the yogi has the self alone for his purpose. Because he seeks only the self, there is nothing that well-wishers, friends, and the rest can do for that purpose, and no ground on which foes can oppose it; so the differences among people simply have no purchase on him. This is also carefully limited. The equality is of the inner buddhi-stance, not of outer conduct. Outward behaviour still follows the natural and dharma-given relations one has with each person; what is held even is only the inner attitude, which is no longer colored by the role another occupies in one's social field. This extends to persons the same fixed, unmoved (kutastha) mark earlier applied to mere things.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators locate the equality precisely in jiva-consciousness, not in worship. Since the supreme Self is the cause of all and is everywhere one uniform consciousness, living beings of themselves are simply consciousness and free of fault; their saintliness, their faults, and all their virtues come entirely from the Lord, and the apparent inequality among them is born of the inner organ (the limiting adjunct) and of error. That is why one should hold an equal vision toward all. But, they insist sharply, this equal vision is not equal worship. To worship the unequal equally, or the equal unequally, is itself a recorded fault that makes even a god or a man fall from his station; honor must follow each one's qualities (wealth, kinship, age, action, learning). They also hold that some inequality is genuine, natural, and eternal: the gods are of the nature of virtue, the demons of fault. So 'equal sight' means the painless sameness of regard, while worship rightly stays unequal; and they note that the yogi anyway does no harm to worldly foes.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

For these commentators the equal-eyedness is not a mere flattening of judgement but flows from a settled fullness. In one voice it is the cit-portion, the conscious self, having come to satisfaction through jnana and vijnana (knowledge and realization) together; outward differences cannot move such a one because he rests on a fullness they can neither add to nor diminish. In the other voice the equality is read through the devotee's relation to Bhagavan: in the state of separation from the Lord, he reads all persons as the Lord's own self, bearing toward each, by remembering the Lord, the very dharma appropriate to that relation, so that his even-mindedness in every situation is what makes him supreme.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

Abhinavagupta gives crisp definitions, noting that the well-wisher is good-hearted without any cause, friendship and enmity are each reciprocal, and the middling one is part friend and part foe. He then adds the distinctive note that the one whose intelligence is even toward all of these, and toward the good and the sinful, not only is more excellent but 'step by step crosses beyond transmigration': the equanimity is framed as a graded ascent out of the cycle of rebirth.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators define the equal buddhi as one void of raga and dvesha toward all the listed kinds, and stress that this even regard toward persons is superior even to evenness toward a clod, a stone, and gold. Jnaneshwari deepens this with a vision-based ground: such a person can hold no idea of friend or foe, own or stranger, because he possesses the true seeing 'I am myself the entire universe'. Just as gold tested against the touchstone proves to be one pure gold under every ornament's differing shape, and as a cloth seen closely is nothing but a single weave of threads, so to his clear vision the whole moving and unmoving universe is realized as rooted in his own self and as nothing but the one Supreme Brahman; his even vision is simply that total experience.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators carry the verse to the ordinary reader. One frames sama-buddhi as plain equal vision and impartiality: the yogi makes no difference of caste, creed, or colour and loves all as his own self, as rooted in the Self. Another reads the list of relations loosely on purpose, holding that the several words are not each meant to fix a separate meaning but are heaped together so that the combination leaves nobody out, an exhaustive sweep. A third draws the practical contrast that gives the verse its point: a thing does no action, so equanimity toward it is easy, but a person acts for himself and against others, so the one in whose understanding and reflection no unevenness or partiality arises even when he watches people behave is the truly high equal-minded person.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas