Advaita Vedānta

These commentators do not let bhakti stand alone as a self-sufficient method; they read the three verbs as a graded path in which devotion works through knowledge. Knowing comes 'from the scriptures'; seeing in direct vision follows; and entering is reached as liberation. Madhusudana spells this out as the classic discipline of hearing, reflection, and profound meditation on the Vedanta sentences, ripening into direct realization of Krishna's own nature, so that on the cessation of ignorance one enters Him and attains being of His very form. Nilakantha ties the stages to specific scriptural means: the 'thou' is purified by scripture, seeing comes by meditation, and the entering comes through the knowledge of the great sentence 'thou art That.' Several of these voices add that the other means the verse excludes are not worthless: the Vedas, sacrifice, gift, and austerity purify the inner organ, and it is only in a purified inner organ that undivided devotion, and through it true Self-knowledge, can arise.

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

Bhakti

These commentators take bhakti as itself the one and sufficient means, and they read the three verbs as the work of devotion alone, not of devotion routed through scriptural knowledge. Sridhara insists the three doors are opened by bhakti and 'only bhakti.' Jnaneshwar gives the entering an ecstatic, loving picture: like rain that must reach the earth or the flooding Ganges rushing to the sea, unswerving devotion carries the devotee until, with all his emotions melting into love, he becomes one with the divine being, and as fire turns firewood to fire, all ego and duality are consumed. Baladeva and Vishvanatha press a sharper point about which form this verse concerns: for them the Krishna who is to be known, seen, and entered is the two-armed or four-armed human-shaped Krishna, the son of Devaki, not the thousand-headed cosmic form. Baladeva argues at length that the human Krishna-form is the harder to see and the higher: it is the source of all incarnations, being-consciousness-bliss knowable through all of Vedanta, while the cosmic form is dependent on it. Vishvanatha adds that even for the seeker bent on liberation, entering Krishna as the essential nature of Brahman is possible only through unalloyed devotion; for the knower, devotion though subordinate is what survives at the final moment and merges.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse as the operative key of the path of grace (Pustimarga). The 'ananya bhakti' Krishna names is specifically raga-following devotion, love kindled in the company of the Lord's own grace-favored people (satsanga), indifferent to the apparatus of Veda-recitation and other means. They are careful that the Vedas and meditations are not denied; rather, the grasping of the Lord in truth is granted to this love alone, and its true object is the very Krishna of Vraja. Vallabha distinguishes a lesser kind of seeing that some get through Krishna's human character or partial character from the true knowing-seeing-entering that only this love attains, and he gathers the cosmic-form display, the imperishable-lordship display, and the friend-form display back to this single object of love. Purushottama reads the three verbs not as three steps in a series but as three faces of the one ananya bhakti: knowing-in-truth, seeing-with-a-supra-worldly loving glance, and entering into Krishna's play (lila) for the sake of loving service (seva).

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

Abhinavagupta reads the verse in the light of the chapter's earlier instruction that 'Vasudeva is all.' For him, in those whose devotion finds its delight in nothing else, no other object of knowledge existing for them, the truth of Vasudeva, whose very self is the universe, descends onto the path of awareness without any effort at all. The stress falls less on a sequence of practices and more on a recognition that dawns of itself once devotion is wholly single, so that the all-pervading reality is realized as one's own awareness.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

Ramsukhdas reads ananya bhakti as having no support, hope, or trust in anything other than the Lord, not in one's own fitness, strength, or intelligence, with none of these holding even the slightest weight in the heart. He stresses that such devotion arises of itself, not manufactured by mind, intellect, and senses, and that its real engine is an inner restlessness (utkantha): a longing so deep that one finds no rest for a moment without the Lord, and in that yearning the sins of countless births are burnt away. He adds a striking turn: sadhana is to be done not to earn the Lord by one's effort but only to dissolve the pride of being the doer of sadhana; when that pride melts, nothing obstructs the Lord's pure grace, and the attainment comes through that grace rather than through the practice itself.

Swami Ramsukhdas