Chapter 15 · Verse 18·Spoken by Arjuna
यस्मात्क्षरमतीतोऽहमक्षरादपि चोत्तमः।अतोऽस्मि लोके वेदे च प्रथितः पुरुषोत्तमः
yasmāt kṣharam atīto ’ham akṣharād api chottamaḥ ato ’smi loke vede cha prathitaḥ puruṣhottamaḥ
Since I transcend the perishable and am higher even than the imperishable, I am celebrated in the world and in the Vedas as the Supreme Person.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Synthesis · a glossed leaf
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
his verse gives the reason behind the famous name. In the previous verse Krishna spoke of a 'highest Person' as if of someone else; here he reveals that this Person is himself, and he supplies the derivation of the name 'Puruṣottama'. The Sanskrit breaks down as puruṣa (person) plus uttama (highest, most excellent), so 'Puruṣottama' means 'the highest of persons'. Krishna says: because I transcend the kṣhara (the perishable) and stand higher even than the akṣhara (the imperishable), therefore I am celebrated by this name. The whole verse is thus a self-explanation of a title: the name is not arbitrary, it states a fact about what Krishna is.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Sant Jñāneśvar
The two terms Krishna rises above are taken from the immediately preceding verses. The kṣhara, the perishable, is glossed as the whole changing world, often pictured as the aśhvattha tree of saṃsāra (the cycle of birth and death), which perishes because it is an effect, a produced thing. The akṣhara, the imperishable, is the higher, unchanging principle behind that world. Krishna names himself uttama, most excellent, in relation to both: he has gone past the perishable and stands above even the imperishable. So his supremacy is not membership in a series but transcendence of the whole series; he is the third reality that overtops both.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Krishna says this name is established 'in the world and in the Veda' (loke vede cha). Both witnesses agree on the same title. The commentators fill this out: in scripture there are texts that call the liberated one who reaches the supreme light 'the highest Person'; and in common religious life and remembered tradition there are sayings such as 'Hari alone is the one Puruṣottama'. The point of citing two witnesses is that this is not a private label coined by a school. It is the name by which both revelation and ordinary devotion already know the Lord, so the title carries the weight of agreed, public recognition.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Sant Jñāneśvar
Several commentators add that this name is the way Krishna's devotees and the seer-poets call upon him. The devotees know him as Puruṣottama, and the poets bind the name into their verses and address him by it. So the verse does not only define a metaphysical status; it hands the seeker a name to use. Knowing Krishna as the one who stands above both the perishable and the imperishable is also knowing the very name by which he can be loved and invoked.
Śaṅkarācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Sivananda
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the perishable as the māyā-tree of transmigration (perishable because it is an effect) and the imperishable as the unevolved seed of that tree, named māyā, the cause of all. Krishna transcends both these adjuncts of the 'Person', which are superimposed on him. One of these voices stacks the levels carefully: above the insentient perishable stands the conditioned individual soul (jīva), above that the māyā-conditioning, and above all the truly unconditioned. The supreme Puruṣa is therefore the one reality beyond every layer of conditioning, the Self free of all limitation, in whom there is no trace of duality. The name simply records this freedom; the literal sense of the verse is plain. One of these voices closes with a personal hymn of relish, savoring the glory of Nārāyaṇa who out of compassion behaves like a man and teaches others their own lordship.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Here the perishable Person is the bound soul caught in matter, and the imperishable is the freed soul (the liberated one). Krishna transcends both by the natures already described and is most excellent even above the released soul. These commentators stress that 'in the world and in the Veda' means in remembered scripture (smṛti) and in revelation (śruti): the word 'world' is taken to point to remembered tradition, because the meaning of the Veda is kept in view there. They cite scriptural texts where the one who attains the supreme light and is brought forth in his own form is called 'the highest Person', and remembered texts about the descents of the unborn Viṣṇu. The name is to be taken precisely as marking transcendence-with-lordship: Puruṣottama is the supreme ruler above both kinds of persons.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read the verse as the Lord's own derivation of his name and treat it as the seal of the whole chapter. The Lord, whose body is sat-chit-ānanda (being, consciousness, bliss), is the uttama who stands above the two persons, the perishable and the imperishable; any appearance of him as something other is by māyā, while in truth the sat-chit-ānanda form alone is he. One voice marks the Puṣṭimārga emphasis: the chapter does not rest in a bare philosophical ranking of perishable, imperishable, and a third principle; it names the Lord himself, with his playful lordship, as the Puruṣottama who is to be loved as such. The other voice hears 'celebrated in the world and the Veda' as the Lord's plain declaration that this is no doctrinal designation invented by a school; it is the world's name, the Veda's name, and the tradition's name, in which the Lord makes himself famous, so that the devotee who calls on him by this name calls on the very form that world, Veda, and tradition have together proclaimed.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
These commentators read 'Puruṣottama' as the name that closes the perishable-imperishable dialectic into a personal third, and that personal third is Krishna, the speaker of the Gītā himself. One voice grounds his transcendence in two qualities: he is past the perishable, the insentient class, because he is eternally liberated, and he is higher than the imperishable, the sentient class, because he is its controller. One voice develops the verse at length to distinguish three modes of worship: the worshippers of Brahman, of the Supreme Self, and of the Lord, whose means are knowledge, yoga, and devotion, and whose fruits are liberation, liberation, and loving service respectively. On this reading, although Brahman, Supreme Self, and Lord are one undivided reality of being-consciousness-bliss, the Lord (and supremely Krishna himself) is called pre-eminent because by his worship every fruit including love can be had, while by the other two love cannot; he is like the mass of fire that not only gives light but removes cold. One voice stresses that even compared to the Lord of Vaikuṇṭha, Krishna is the source, 'Krishna is the Lord himself', and another reads 'loka' by derivation as the scripture not composed by man, citing both Vedic and Purāṇic texts that name him the highest Person.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These commentators keep the plain sense but each adds an emphasis. One reads the perishable as the tree of illusory saṃsāra and the imperishable as its seed, and stresses that the name is apt because Krishna is beyond all limitation with no trace of dualism, known as the highest Puruṣa by all and by the scriptures. One argues a precise technical point: the akṣhara meant here is not the supreme Brahman but the imperceptible Prakṛti of Sāṃkhya (the unmanifest material cause), so that Puruṣottama, beyond both the visible cosmos and unmanifest Prakṛti, is the same as the supreme Brahman and the Paramātman who dwells in the body as the knower of the field, one and the same principle in the body and in the cosmos. One reads the perishable as ever-changing Prakṛti and the imperishable as the individual soul (jīvātmā), which is the Lord's own portion and shares essential oneness with him, yet is still called lower: because the soul, though the Lord's portion, imagines a tie with changing matter and is deluded by the guṇas, while the Lord is forever untouched, keeps Prakṛti under him, and descends as avatāra by his own will, whereas the soul comes under Prakṛti's compulsion. This voice also notes that calling himself 'beyond' the perishable but 'higher than' the imperishable shows that perishable and imperishable are themselves different from each other.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If Krishna is identical with the changeless imperishable reality, how can he also be said to stand 'higher' than it, as a distinct and superior third?
The first thing to see is that the verse is naming a transcendence of the whole pair, not slotting Krishna into a ranking. The perishable and the imperishable are taken as two aspects or adjuncts of 'person', and Krishna is the uttama who overtops both. He is not the higher of two items in a list; he is the third reality beyond the list, which is why the very name Puruṣottama, 'the highest Person', could be coined at all.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
The schools differ on what the imperishable even refers to, and that resolves much of the tension. For one line of reading the imperishable is unmanifest māyā or Prakṛti, the unevolved seed of the world, so Krishna stands above it as the reality behind the cause itself; for another the imperishable is the liberated or individual soul, and Krishna stands above it as its eternal master and controller, the soul being only his portion. On either reading, what he is 'higher' than is not his own ultimate nature but a lower principle that the word 'imperishable' here names.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas · Lokmanya Tilak
Where Krishna does seem to overtop the very Absolute, the bhakti reading explains it as a difference of mode, not of substance. Brahman, Supreme Self, and Lord are one undivided being-consciousness-bliss with no real difference in essential nature; yet because their worshippers reach them by different means (knowledge, yoga, devotion) and gain different fruits (liberation, liberation, loving service), the Lord is called pre-eminent, since by his worship every fruit including love can be had. The 'higher' is thus the fullness of the same one reality approached personally and lovingly, like the mass of fire that gives both light and warmth where the bare spark gives only light.
Śrīla Viśvanātha · Vallabhācārya
Contemplation
Take to heart the diagnosis this verse offers. You are, in your true nature, the akṣhara, the imperishable that stands like a rock in the river while the body flows past it without stop. From childhood the body has wholly changed, yet you still say 'I am the same one', and you cannot point to the day childhood ended and youth began. The body flows like a river; you stand unmoving in it, unattached. The one mistake, and there is no greater one, is that the imperishable grasps the perishable body and the changing world and calls them 'mine'. That tie is only imagined; not for a single moment does it really hold. The freeing practice is simple: stop claiming the body as property and start using it as an instrument of service. The body was not given to you to own but to serve through. Make the perishable serve the perishable, that is, let the body be the manure that nourishes the garden of the world, and the false ownership quietly falls away.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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