Advaita Vedānta

The 'great Brahman' here is the three-quality maya, Nature made of sattva, rajas and tamas. The Lord, who holds the two powers of field and field-knower, casts the seed of consciousness into maya, and the first effect to arise is Hiranyagarbha (the cosmic first-born, also called the great principle, mahat-tattva), from whom all beings then come. The joining of field with field-knower is effected through the adjuncts of ignorance, desire and action. The whole point of saying 'mine' is to overturn the Sankhya view of an independent prakriti: maya is real-functioning but dependent on the conscious Self, and it is consciousness reflected into maya that drives the world's arising.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This verse spells out the Lord's two natures named earlier. The insentient nature (earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, understanding, egotism, the 'lower' eightfold nature) is the 'great Brahman,' the womb; scripture itself sometimes calls matter 'Brahman.' The 'higher' nature, the mass of conscious souls, is the 'seed.' The Lord joins the conscious host to the insentient field of experience, and from this conjunction of the two natures, made by his resolve alone, all beings arise from Brahma down to a clump of grass. The verse exhibits the Lord-prakriti relation at the cosmic register: both natures are dependent, both are his body, and even their effect-state conjunction is his doing.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

The 'great Brahman' is not inert nescience but a conscious prakriti, the goddess Mahalakshmi, who presides over inert matter and its qualities. She appears as Shri, Bhu and Durga, while Uma, Vac and other goddesses are distinct souls joined to a portion of her. Crucially, 'my womb' does not mean the Lord's own essential nature, which would make her his mother; it means his wife, the womb that holds the seed, a sense fixed by the rest of the verse ('in it I place the seed') and by scripture. This conscious goddess is free of all suffering; her apparent sorrows (such as Sita's) are a mere mock-showing staged to delude, and the Sita carried off by Ravana was an illusory likeness, her 'shadow.' Scripture even speaks of two 'great Brahmans,' prakriti and the great Lord.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

There is no two-tier scheme of an upper Purusha consorting with a lower Prakriti standing over against him. The 'great Brahman' womb is the Lord's own portion (his sat-portion-nature), called Brahman because she is of the very Brahman-substance, from which name, form and food arise. The Lord, the imperishable Self-Purusha, places his own seed, the conscious-mass compacted into the cosmic thread-form; the seed is his own resolve, his wish-for-play (krida-iccha). The world's becoming is therefore from beginning to end a single self-display, the unfolding of the Lord's own play (the Pustimarga reading): womb, seed and offspring are all his.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

Krishna is teaching the sequence of transmigration so that, knowing what is to be abandoned and how, abandoning becomes easy. The 'great Brahman' is the form of the Lord's own power, the power that makes things grow (brmhaka). Resting on his power of self-reflective awareness (vimarsha-shakti), the Lord, out of grace, sends the beginningless atom-souls into transmigration. The cosmogony is thus an act grounded in the Lord's reflexive consciousness and oriented toward grace.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

The great Brahman is prakriti as the cosmic womb, held inside the personal agency of the Lord (Vasudeva/Paramesvara). At dissolution the soul lies dormant in him, still bearing avidya, kama and karma; at creation he conjoins it again with the field, its object of enjoyment, by his own hand. The 'seed' is the higher, conscious nature, the very life of all living creatures, deposited into the lower, insentient nature; from this union of the two natures all beings from Brahma down to a tuft of grass are born. Mother and father, lower and higher nature, all hang from the single will of the Lord. The Marathi voice expands this into an extended allegory: maya is the Lord's beginningless 'housewife,' formless and unfathomable, who conceives by union with the Self and, in the gross-Brahman womb, develops the embryo with her eightfold constitution into the whole universe, the four classes of birth, and a single vast cosmic child whose limbs are the worlds, who plays through the ages and meets its end only in true knowledge.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

The womb is the great Nature, Mulaprakriti, the Primordial Nature called Avyakta by those who view the Unmanifest, Maya by the Vedantins, Prakriti by the Sankhyas; it is the material cause of all, the dark matrix of infinite potential. It cannot create forms by itself, so the Lord places the seed and, through the birth of Brahma/Hiranyagarbha, all the orders of beings (the four classes of birth) come forth. One modern voice deepens 'great Brahman' with extra readings: Nature is most pervasive of all things in the world after the supreme Self alone; she lies between mahat (cosmic intellect) and brahma (the supreme); and the term fixes the previous verse's creation and dissolution as the great cosmic cycle, so that the liberated, whose tie even to Nature is cut, are neither born at the great creation nor pained at the great dissolution. For this voice the 'seed' is the whole mass of souls with their karmic impressions, not freshly made but flowing from beginningless time, and the verse's real lesson is that the soul's true bond is with the supreme Self who stands above Nature, not with Nature itself.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas