Advaita Vedānta

The joining of field and field-knower is read as false knowledge, a mutual superimposition born of ignorance. The field-knower is partless like space, the self-luminous, propertyless, non-dual consciousness; the field is insentient, indefinable as either existent or non-existent, of the nature of ignorance and its effects. Their union cannot be physical contact or an inherence like threads in cloth, since they share no cause-effect relation; it can only be the mistaken reading of each into the other, like a snake imagined on a rope. So the whole moving and unmoving world, though it appears real, is unreal like a dream, a magician's elephant, or a city of the gandharvas. When right discernment separates the knower from the field, as one draws a reed from muñja-grass, the false knowledge departs, the cause of birth is gone, and the knower is not born again.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Ānandagiri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators take the verse straight as a cosmological law and tie it to the seeing taught nearby: every born being is a conjunction of field and field-knower, and the candidate is to use this doctrine as the key to the whole cosmic field, since nothing of that field stands outside it. The decisive vision is then to see, in all these conjoined beings, the self set apart from the disparate shapes of god, human, and the rest, abiding in each body, sense, and mind as the Supreme Lord; and to see it as imperishable, of a nature unfit for destruction, when those bodies perish. One who sees the self as it truly is, distinct and unperishing, is freed; one who sees the self as itself disparate, born and destroyed like the bodies, transmigrates forever. The relation is real, not a mistaken superimposition to be dissolved.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

Here Krishna again states the own-form of the topic, the person and the Lord, as joined with attributes such as sameness and the rest. The reasoning given is 'because of equality': the Lord's distinguishing attribute is taken as equality in preference to the shared attribute of both nature and spirit. The earlier statement of the attributes of nature and spirit was covered by the question 'of what sort,' while the statement of the Lord's own attribute is covered by 'whose power.' The restatement is therefore not redundant; it isolates the Lord's proper attribute from those of the conjoined pair.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the joining as the union of sat and cit, of the kshetra and the atman, which stand joined and not separately one from the other; as the scriptural saying has it, 'born of the two-joined are the breath-bearers, like water-bubbles.' No being in the world stands apart from this double-rooted becoming. But the joining is for the sake of the Lord's play (lila): the very 'sat,' the being that shines at all in any standing or moving thing, shines because of the conjunction of the field with the field-knower who is the Purushottama himself. So the right way to know any thing is to read its very being as the print of the indwelling Lord (antaryamin) standing within its field, and the wise vision sees the Lord's inner presence in every joined thing without exception. This reading is to be taken inwardly, toward devotion, not as a mere cosmic generalization.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

Terse and pointed: whatever there is, moving or unmoving, none of it can be a thing that stands apart from the knower of the field. The whole of existence is held within, and never outside, the knower.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators read the verse through the seeing named by the word 'equally' (samam): one should see the Supreme Lord, though situated in primordial nature and in the beings conjoined with it, as distinct from them. He abides equally, of a single savor, in all beings, in the dwellers in the bodies of the moving and the unmoving, and does not perish when those bodies wear away and go to destruction. Whoever truly sees Him so, even amid perishing bodies, he alone is the knower of His real nature. Jnaneshwar develops this with a cascade of images: as the same gold runs through differently shaped ornaments, the same heat through scattered sparks of fire, the same water through rain spread across the sky, the same space appears in different pots, so the one Supreme Self abides uniform within beings of countless forms, names, and colors. To let those outward differences govern your vision is to stay bound through crores of births; to see the Self as aloof from the being's natural properties yet not separate from the being itself is to have the true eye of knowledge.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

The modern voices split along the same fault line as the classical ones. One restates the Advaita reading plainly: whatever is born, moving or unmoving, is due to the union of body and Self, a union of the nature of mutual superimposition, like rope and snake, that disappears with Self-knowledge, after which the sage is not born again. Another reads the verse with the 'equally' line: he who has seen the Paramesvara, who is equally in all created things and is not destroyed even when all beings are destroyed, may be said to have understood the real principle. A third takes it as a settled cosmological rule with a practical edge: creation has no third cause beyond prakriti and purusha, which frees the seeker from competing theories of causation and hands him the key that, where the conjunction is broken, no new birth can arise, and there liberation stands.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas