Advaita Vedānta

This school reads the verse as straightforwardly praising the universal cosmic form (vishva-rupa) as supremely worthy of worship and almost unobtainable. The whole point of naming the gods is to magnify how rare the sight is: even Indra and the other deities, who are of the highest sattvic nature, longed for it but did not see it truly and never will. The 'always' in the verse is explained by the unfulfilled longing itself, kept permanent because the seeing never comes. The verse here functions as praise of the form and of the grace Krishna has shown Arjuna.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This school identifies the hard-to-see form specifically as the Lord in His role as the governor, support, and cause of all; the cosmic form is the supreme controller made visible. One source adds a pointed note: even the gods, who in their long lives have already seen many forms, still perennially desire this particular one, which underscores that this vision stands above every other a deva might have witnessed.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

This school takes the verse to settle that the Lord is attainable only by grace and devotion (pushti). It reasons from the lesser to the greater: if the Lord Himself is most hard to see, how much more His self-related form, the imperishable cosmic form. Crucially, the gods do not see it even though they are sattvic, and the explanation is that the grace-seed has not been planted in them. Arjuna sees because he was set in the chariot of the Lord's own love, and that very setting is the grace-seed. One source elaborates with the story of Brahma and the gods hymning the Lord in Devaki's womb: the gods, lacking direct knowledge, only attain the kind of form-seeing the Veda prescribes, and stand longing for the deeper form of the Lord's own being, heard of only from the mouths of devotees.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

This school reads the verse as Krishna underlining grace and steering Arjuna's devotion. One source notes the verse simply confirms what an earlier verse already said: the gods who dwell within the cosmic form still cannot get its sight on demand, while the devotee in the chariot has been given it. Another offers a striking psychological reading: Krishna gave Arjuna a divine eye but deliberately not a divine mind, so that even while seeing the cosmic form Arjuna did not relish it, because his mind tastes only the sweetness of Krishna's human shape; had a divine mind been given, Arjuna would have relished the cosmic form as the gods would. A third source frames the whole speech as Krishna gently teaching Arjuna not to slacken in his love for Krishna's human form, redirecting him back to devotion to the two-armed Lord. The Marathi source adds that even Shiva's austere penances and the eightfold yoga of the yogins fall short of this vision, which was placed effortlessly before Arjuna.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

Two of these voices give a plain restatement: the form is very hard to see, the gods always desire it and have not had their wish gratified even in dreams, and yet Arjuna has seen it easily. One modern voice diverges sharply on what 'su-durdarsha' refers to: he argues it points only to the four-armed form of Vishnu, not the cosmic form and not the two-armed human form. His reasoning is that the gods would not even begin to conceive of the cosmic form, and the human form, being easily seen by men, could hardly be called hard for the gods to see; so the hard-to-see form named here must be the four-armed form for which the earlier terms 'divine form' and 'My own form' were used.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas