Chapter 11 · Verse 40·Spoken by Arjuna
नमः पुरस्तादथ पृष्ठतस्ते नमोऽस्तु ते सर्वत एव सर्व। अनन्तवीर्यामितविक्रमस्त्वं सर्वं समाप्नोषि ततोऽसि सर्वः
namaḥ purastād atha pṛiṣhṭhatas te namo ’stu te sarvata eva sarva ananta-vīryāmita-vikramas tvaṁ sarvaṁ samāpnoṣhi tato ’si sarvaḥ
Salutations to you in front and behind. Salutations to you on every side, you who are all. Your strength is infinite, your power beyond measure. You pervade everything, and so you are everything.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rjuna bows to the Lord from every direction at once: from the front, from behind, and from all sides. The commentators take this literally as an all-around prostration. Because the divine form fills space in every quarter, Arjuna offers salutation to the front (the eastern quarter, where the sun rises), to the back, and to all the directions and corners alike, so that no side is left unsaluted. Several readers stress that the repeated 'namah, namah' is not redundant: Arjuna, overwhelmed, simply keeps bowing again and again, unable to find an end to his salutations.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
The verse names the Lord directly as 'sarva,' which means 'All.' The commentators agree this title is earned, not poetic flattery: because the Lord pervades everything, He is rightly called the All. He stands everywhere, in every quarter and in the middle too; nothing is set apart from Him. So 'All' becomes, in effect, His very name.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda
The two epithets are carefully distinguished. 'Ananta-vīrya' means of endless might or strength, and 'amita-vikrama' means of measureless valour or prowess. Most commentators separate the pair: vīrya is bodily strength or raw capacity, while vikrama is prowess in action, in particular skill and training in the use of weapons. The point is that the two need not go together in ordinary beings. One may have great strength yet fail to use it against foes, or have only feeble prowess; the Lord, by contrast, is unlimited in both at once. Some recall the Mahabharata measure where one warrior is counted superior in strength and another in training (as said of Bhima and Duryodhana), precisely to show that in the Lord both are boundless and undivided.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Dhanapati Sūri
The verse gives its own reason for calling the Lord 'All': 'You pervade everything, therefore You are all.' The Lord reaches and encompasses the whole universe, fully, by a single being or self. This pervasion is the ground of His being the All; because nothing lies outside His reach, nothing exists apart from Him. The bhakti commentators sharpen this with the image of gold: just as gold pervades and becomes the bracelet, the earring, and every ornament without ever ceasing to be the one gold, so the Lord takes the shape of all things while remaining the one reality, and the cosmic form shows not many things outside Him but Him alone wearing every form.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
The Lord pervades the whole world with a single, undivided Self, and therefore He is the All in the strict sense that nothing whatever exists apart from Him. 'You are all; there is nothing whatever apart from You' is read as a statement of non-difference: the apparent many resolve into the one all-pervading Self. The address 'O All' is taken to declare this all-Self-hood, while still marking the Lord as distinct from the world as ordinarily seen. On this reading Arjuna's salutation closes by acknowledging that he had offended through not knowing this greatness.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrī Ānandagiri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
The Lord is called 'All' because He reaches over every conscious and unconscious thing as their inner Self. The cosmos of sentient and insentient beings is His body and so His mode, and a self with all things for its body is rightly denoted by the single word 'all.' This is the same grammatical co-ordination already used in 'You are the imperishable, the existent and the non-existent' and 'You are wind, Yama, fire': in each case the ground of the identification is that He abides as the inner self of the thing named, not that the thing has no reality of its own.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
The whole universe, made up of the existent and the non-existent, is said to be the Lord precisely because He is the giver of existence and the rest, and not by sheer identity. This commentator reads the title with care so that it does not contradict the surrounding verses: 'great-souled' must not be taken to mean petty-minded, and 'atman' here must not be reduced to the individual soul. The Lord is the everlasting, all-pervading reality on whom the world depends, which is a different claim from saying the world simply is Him without distinction.
Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
The address 'ananta-vīrya, O All' is read through the school's two-form doctrine: the supreme Brahman, who is Krishna, sat-cit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss), is at once the all and the other-than-the-all. The cosmic form is the seeing, with one's own eyes, of this two-fold character. The Lord stands having become every form by way of the names and forms of this and that, and therefore He is 'sarva,' of every form; this even explains how salutation offered behind Him is not obstructed, since His front is everywhere.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
These readers press the gold-and-ornament image to its full strength: the universe is the Lord's own effect, which He pervades inside and out as gold pervades its bracelet and earring, so He alone is all. The cosmic vision therefore does not display many separate things; it displays Vasudeva alone taking the shape of all things. One reader frames the whole verse as flowing from the excess of Arjuna's devotion, bowing many times over because he cannot have enough of salutations, and cites the Vaishnava text that the very host of deities drawing near is the all-pervading creator Himself.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva
Modern
These commentators read the all-directional bowing through Arjuna's inner state. Since the all-pervading Self cannot really have a front and a back (only finite objects have sides), Arjuna's prostration in every direction is an act of extreme faith and devotion: in his fear and his sense that what he should say is beyond him, he imagines front and back and simply keeps offering salutation toward all the ten directions. The form is understood, but the emphasis falls on the overwhelmed, devoted heart rather than on metaphysical analysis.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If the Lord truly pervades and is everything, why does Arjuna bow toward separate directions, and does calling Him 'All' mean nothing else exists?
The all-directional bowing is exactly the point, not a contradiction of it. Because the Lord stands in every quarter, before, behind, and on all sides, there is no direction in which He is absent, so Arjuna salutes toward all of them. Some readers add that since the all-pervading Self has no real front or back the way finite objects do, Arjuna's bowing in every direction is the natural overflow of faith and awe rather than a measuring of the Lord's shape.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
As for what 'All' means, the commentators agree on the reason the title is given, He pervades everything and so nothing lies outside Him, but they read its force differently, and it is worth holding the spread. For the non-dualists it means there is truly nothing whatever apart from Him, the many resolving into one all-pervading Self. For the qualified non-dualist it means He is the inner self of every conscious and unconscious thing, which are His body and mode, so the things are real yet are denoted by His name. For the dualist it means the world is called Him because He is the giver of its existence, on whom it depends, not because it lacks its own being.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
The gold-and-ornament image offers a way to hold the heart of it without forcing the metaphysics. Just as gold pervades and becomes the bracelet and the earring while remaining the one gold, the cosmic form shows the Lord alone taking the shape of all things. Whether you read the ornaments as ultimately only gold or as real shapes wholly dependent on it, the seeing is the same: you are not looking at many things scattered apart from God, you are looking at the one reality wearing every form.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva
Contemplation
Notice what Arjuna does when words fail him. He is frightened, and what he should say is beyond him, so he stops trying to find the right phrase and simply bows: from in front, from behind, from every side, from all ten directions, salutation and salutation again. There is a quiet teaching in this. When the reality before you is larger than anything you can express, you do not need a perfect formula. You need only to turn toward it from wherever you stand and offer yourself. Let the bowing itself be the prayer when the mind cannot keep up.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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