The door was never shut; what closes it is your own conduct and delusion.

A brief, compact diagnosis, closed by naming its opposite.

What survives of Shankara's own comment here is short: evildoers, the deluded, are lowest among people because maya has carried off their knowledge, and they have taken up the demonic way, marked by cruelty and lying. He closes with a plain contrast rather than an extended account of maya's workings: there are also the highest of people, those of good deeds. Read honestly, this is a stark diagnosis and its counterweight, not a developed theory of how maya specifically veils the Self in this verse.

Four kinds of evildoer, one obstacle from four sides.

Ramanuja reads the four listed terms as four kinds of evildoer, rising in gravity, though they usually describe the same persons from different angles rather than four separate camps. The deluded cling to matter alone, unable to see the self's true relation to the Lord. The lowest of men know the Lord roughly and yet stay unfit to turn to him. Those whose knowledge is carried off had once truly known the Lord, until twisting arguments carried that knowledge away. Those in the demonic state have let even settled knowledge of the Lord curdle into hatred. None of them take refuge, not because refuge is closed, but because their own condition has closed them off from it.

Only the lowest souls meant; the fault is theirs alone.

Madhva reads knowledge as the very nature of the jiva, here overpowered rather than erased by maya. He restricts the verse with care: only souls of false knowledge, born of unrighteousness, are meant by these words, never the good, and never the deities or the higher and middling among men. He gives a precise word-history for asura, those who delight in the breaths, and insists that such people fail to take refuge from their own fault alone, never because refuge itself fails as a means across maya.

A single surviving line, reported honestly as thin.

What remains of Abhinavagupta's comment here is very compact: though the body fit for turning toward the Lord is right there, some people do not turn, and are doers of evil, lowest of men, deluded, demonic, sunk in inertia. He adds one striking note, that this very failure is itself the glory of maya, her own power on display, but the fragment stops there. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading, one might extend this to say the failure names a contraction of the self's own freedom into a narrow, anxious identity, but that extension is a reasoned continuation, not Abhinavagupta's own stated word.

Non-worship as the symptom; the chain runs backward to its cause.

Sridhara reads the verse as a backward-running diagnosis. The visible sign is the absence of devotion; its hidden root runs back through delusion and evildoing to knowledge stripped away by maya, which in turn issues in the demonic disposition that later shows as hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, and anger. He treats the terms as one condition read from several angles, each failure feeding the next rather than standing apart.

A causal chain from stale sin to lost discernment to ruin.

Madhusudana traces a precise sequence rather than a list of insults: long-piled sin blocks the return to the Lord, the sin persists because discernment has been lost, and discernment is lost because maya has hardened into the specific error of mistaking the body for the self. He closes with something close to plain sorrow: this is the person's own misfortune, not a decree handed down against them from outside.