Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as comparing two legitimate disciplines that lead to the one Brahman, the difference lying only in the means and the labor. The worship of the qualified Brahman ('saguna', with attributes) is the easier method; the worship of the unmanifest, attributeless Brahman ('nirguna') is harder because it demands withdrawing the mind from all objects and renouncing the conceit of the body. One source spells out the concrete toil of the formless seeker: renouncing all action, approaching a teacher, and the great labor of removing one error after another in the Vedanta sentences through inquiry. The fruit is held to be one and the same; the seekers who reach it by an easy means are simply superior to those who reach it by a hard means. One source adds a vivid map of stages by which the supported, with-form contemplator climbs safely to the highest, while the unsupported, formless contemplator, like a bird trying to leap suddenly to a high perch, is exposed to mental dissolution ('laya') and distraction ('vikshepa'), can even mistake torpor for absorption, and so risks failure; this is why his effort is the greater.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This commentator keeps closely to the plain sense of the words: for those whose minds are attached to the unmanifest, the toil is the greater, because the unmanifest course, the working of a mind whose object is the unmanifest, is gained with pain by the embodied, who take the very body for the self. Reading it as praise of the Lord's worshippers, this source says the verse states 'quite plainly' that those who worship the Blessed One are the most firmly joined of all.

Rāmānujācārya

Dvaita

These commentators give a distinctive reading of 'gati', goal, taking it not as the thing to be reached but as the means or door, 'that by which one goes'. So the verse speaks of the path 'whose door is the worship of the unmanifest'. On this reading the worship of the Lord (Vishnu) still follows, and it alone gives release; the worship of the unmanifest by itself never does. The path is more toilsome because the highest worship requires a whole array of stringent means, complete restraint of the senses, an intellect even toward all, delight in the welfare of all beings, excellent conduct, and right devotion to Vishnu, without which there is no direct realization and no grace. Even where this grace is present, without full worship of the Lord there is no release, whereas the Lord's worshipper attains release even without worship of the unmanifest. Moreover the Lord, of His own accord, gives the means to the devotee who has devotion, so the devotional path is eased while the other stays harder. One source marshals scriptural citations to insist that the 'higher than the great' is the Lord alone, and that the Vedic 'unmanifest' here is not the independent primordial nature ('pradhana') of the Sankhyas but a reality dependent on the Lord, so the unmanifest form is not rejected.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the verse as exposing a real defect, not just a difficulty, in the formless path: it yields no happiness even after attainment. To merge into the undifferentiated 'akshara' is to lose one's own being into mere oneness, like salt dissolving in water; it is a 'painful unmanifest course', not the bliss of 'rasa', the savor of loving relationship. One source says that casting off devotion to the Supreme Person ('purushottama') to toil for knowledge of the bare imperishable is to forsake the auspicious road for mere labor. The toil is greater in two ways: even the practice is suffering, because cultivating a distinctionless object through non-difference itself yields pain; and the senses, fashioned for the Lord's service, fall into incapacity when turned toward the objectless unmanifest, while the longing for vision finds nothing to satisfy it. One source adds that even after entering the unmanifest the soul, remembering past sense-relish, suffers like one submerged in water who still tries to drink water. On the devotional path, by contrast, supreme bliss is present from the very beginning; on the imperishable path, only at the end, if at all.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators frame the verse as showing why the devotee is superior: the formless path is hard because the senses know only particulars and cannot grasp the particular-less, so total sense-restraint, hard as damming a flooding river, is unavoidable. One source presses further, citing Bhagavata verses to argue that even the formless goal is reached only when devotion is mixed in, and that for those who worship Brahman alone without devotion to the Lord, 'mere trouble alone is the gain', like threshing empty husks. One source rebuts at length the view of 'some' that Brahman is twofold (with and without qualities) and that the attributeless is what 'akshara' denotes; using the aphorism 'it is feeble, because of the commonality of the path' and scriptural reasoning, it argues that a truly qualityless Brahman would have no means of valid knowledge, would be a mere nothing, and that imagining a qualityless imperishable dwelling within the conscious Lord who suckled at Yashoda's breast is born of dullness of faith. One source paints the formless seeker's life as a continuous struggle with death, swallowing poison subtler than death, swimming the sea on one's own arms, walking in the sky, while the devotee is spared such misery.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators present the same comparison in accessible terms while differing in emphasis. One holds that worshippers of the qualified ('saguna') and the unqualified ('nirguna') Brahman reach the same goal, but the formless path is harder because the body-attachment must be dropped from the very start and the restless mind must be fixed on the formless, which demands an unusually sharp, subtle, one-pointed intellect; this source also explains how the worshipper of the qualified eventually reaches the same state through the Lord's grace without the full discipline of hearing, reflection, and meditation. One source observes that human language fails before the Formless, so that even iconoclasts are at bottom image-worshippers, and that the goal of becoming one with the object of devotion is best reached through some form; hence 'the short cut to the Unmanifest is really the longest and the most difficult'. One source, non-sectarian devotional Vedanta, locates the trouble precisely: the phrase names seekers who esteem formless worship but whose mind has not yet entered the formless reality, lacking taste ('ruchi'), trust ('vishvasa'), and inner fitness ('yogyata'), and who, short on dispassion and still gripped by body-identification, find the mind hanging in between, with no form to rest on and no realization to dissolve into; this source insists the aim is not to discourage formless worship but to be honest with the seeker, since the intimate path of personal devotion is kinder to one who is still embodied.

Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas