Chapter 13 · Verse 28·Spoken by Arjuna
समं सर्वेषु भूतेषु तिष्ठन्तं परमेश्वरम्।विनश्यत्स्वविनश्यन्तं यः पश्यति स पश्यति
samaṁ sarveṣhu bhūteṣhu tiṣhṭhantaṁ parameśhvaram vinaśhyatsv avinaśhyantaṁ yaḥ paśhyati sa paśhyati
Whoever sees the Supreme Lord present alike in all beings, the imperishable within the perishable, truly sees.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
he verse describes the one true way of seeing. The seer beholds the supreme Lord (parameshvara) standing 'samam', the same, in all beings, from the highest creature down to the unmoving things. 'Samam' means equal and undivided: the Lord is not larger in a great being and smaller in a small one, not one thing in the ant and another in the god. He is the same in saint and rogue, in the body one calls one's own and in every other body. To see this is the proper seeing; to miss it is to not see at all.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The verse turns on a sharp contrast: 'vinashyatsu avinashyantam', the imperishable amidst the perishing. The beings are marked out as perishing because they are subject to birth and the chain of changes that follow it: growth, decay, death. The Lord is marked out as not perishing because he is birthless, and so free of all those changes; he abides untouched even when every being is destroyed. Several commentators note that mentioning the last change, destruction, implies the whole sequence and so sets the Lord utterly apart from all created things. This twofold seeing is one act: the same vision that sees the Lord as the equal Self in all beings sees him as the imperishable amidst the perishable, and either half alone is incomplete.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas · Vedānta Deśika · Sant Jñāneśvar
The repeated 'sa pashyati', he alone truly sees, is a deliberate qualification, not a redundancy. Everyone uses their eyes, but most see wrongly, and wrong seeing is a kind of blindness. Several commentators use the image of a person with dimmed sight who sees many moons: set against the one who sees the single moon, he is the one who does not really see. Just so, the person who sees many separate, divided selves does not see at all, however much he looks, while the one who sees the single undivided Self in all beings is the only real seer. Wrong seeing is itself the non-seeing of the truth, as seeing a rope as a snake is the non-seeing of the rope.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Swami Sivananda · Vedānta Deśika · Śrīdhara Svāmī
This right seeing is not idle; it is the very knowledge that ends bondage. By seeing the pure Self as wholly distinct from the changing, insentient display, ignorance ceases, and with it ceases its effect, the round of birth (samsara). The cause of rebirth is the ignorance-rooted union of the Self with the body; right vision removes that cause, so the seer is not born again and reaches the supreme goal. The verse is given to state and praise the fruit of correct seeing and so to draw the seeker toward it.
Braided from 8 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Rāmānujācārya · Sant Jñāneśvar · Lokmanya Tilak
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the Lord seen 'the same in all beings' as the one, undifferentiated Self, and the seeing as discrimination of that single Self from the manifold insentient display. The supreme Lord is supreme in relation to the body, senses, mind, intellect, the unmanifest, and the individual soul; he is undifferentiated and one. The beings are likened to a city of gandharvas conjured by maya, of 'seen-and-vanished' nature, mutually cancelling and so unreal; the Lord alone is uncancelled even when all duality is cancelled. The right seeing is therefore like waking from a dream and cancelling the dream-error by waking knowledge: by seeing the pure Self uncoloured by anything else, ignorance, which is the non-seeing of that Self, ceases, and with it samsara. One of these commentators adds that the ignorant person, holding the conceit 'I am the body', veils the ever-manifest Self and so is a slayer of the Self by the Self, while the knower, free of that conceit, does not so slay and rests in the supreme bliss.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Ānandagiri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators read the Lord seen everywhere as the Self of all beings precisely by being their owner, support, and inner governor, set apart from the disparate shapes of god, human, and the rest. The sameness is the single form of knowledge by which the Lord is present, not a flattening of the real differences between bodies. To see the Lord thus is to not harm one's own self by the mind, but to guard it and free it from transmigration; from this seeing the knower goes to the supreme goal, attaining the Self abiding as it truly is. By contrast, one who sees the self everywhere as joined with and identical to the disparate shapes harms the self and casts it into the ocean of becoming.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read this as the locus classicus of the Pushtimarga: the right seeing is not the seeing of a bare Brahman-as-substrate, nor of an abstract sameness that flattens distinction, but the seeing of the Lord himself, the inner controller (antaryamin), standing in equal presence within every being. The Lord stands within each being by his play (lila), taking his enjoyment of rasa in each field (kshetra), even-tempered and undisturbed by their birthing and perishing, free of the qualities of high and low. The right-seer is the devotee disciplined by the marks of knowledge and standing in undivided yoga (ananya-yoga); the one who reads beings without their knower-of-the-field misses the supreme Person at the very place he had stood forth and so becomes an offender (saparadha).
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
These commentators read the Lord as the Paramatman standing without distinction (nirvishesha), equal in his being-form, in all beings mobile and immobile alike, and stress the twofold movement of the single vision: it sees him equal in all and imperishable amidst the perishing, since difference-vision and perishability-illusion mutually sustain each other. Drawing on the surrounding verse, several add that by this seeing one does not, by the mind that runs on a wrong path, injure or cast down the individual self; the mind made dispassionate toward the savor of sense objects, and grasping the self's distinction from the modifications of primordial nature, attains the supreme goal. One renders this devotionally: as the one light is the same in millions of lamps, the Lord abides everywhere; the one who lives in even-vision is not fettered by future births and merges into the Highest at the end of his worldly career.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These commentators keep the classical sense and draw out its lived consequence. The Self is uniform everywhere, indestructible where all living beings are perishable, and the one who beholds it through the inner eye of wisdom is a liberated sage who has realised the immortal knower of the field. One stresses the ethical fruit: seeing the same God everywhere, one merges in him, does not yield to passion, does not become one's own foe, and so attains freedom; the verse echoes the earlier teaching that the Self is one's own friend and enemy. Another draws out the moral ground most fully: to see this sameness (samata) is not to lose the world but to find its true ground, and from this samata flow non-harming, compassion, and friendliness, the natural treatment of every being as one's own; the devotee need add nothing to the world, but has only to see what is already there.
Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If the Lord is exactly the same in saint and in rogue, in the ant and in the deva, does this even-vision erase the real differences between beings and dissolve all moral and practical distinction?
The sameness named here is not a sameness of bodies but of the one presence abiding within them. The beings genuinely differ and genuinely perish; what is seen as 'the same' is the imperishable Lord standing equally amidst all that difference and change. The very structure of the verse holds both together: the perishing many and the one imperishable, seen in a single act of vision.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
Far from dissolving morality, this seeing is its very ground. One commentator says the one who sees the same God everywhere does not yield to passion and does not become his own foe; another says that from this sameness flow non-harming, compassion, and friendliness, the natural treatment of every being as one's own. Even-vision does not flatten the world into indifference; it produces care.
Mahatma Gandhi · Swami Ramsukhdas
Several commentators are careful that the sameness is not a flattening of real distinction at all. In one reading the Lord is the same as the inner controller and owner of beings precisely while remaining set apart from their disparate shapes; in another the same Lord stands within each being taking his distinct enjoyment in each field, so that to read beings as a bare uniform substrate, without their indwelling knower, is itself the error.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Contemplation
Bring this verse to the place where you actually live, among other people and creatures. The teaching is not asking you to add anything to the world or to manufacture a feeling. It asks you only to see what is already there: the same imperishable presence standing equally in the ant and in the noble being, in the one you call friend and the one you call enemy, in the body you call your own and in every other body. When you begin to see this sameness (samata), it does not make you lose the world; it lets you find its true ground. And from that seeing, certain things flow on their own: non-harming (ahimsa), compassion (karuna), and friendliness (maitri). You start to treat every being as you would treat your own. So the practice is simply this steady looking, until the even presence in all becomes what you notice first.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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