Advaita Vedānta

The soul's being a 'portion' of the supreme Self is not literally true but imagined. The supreme Self is partless; a portion is spoken of only because ignorance sets up an adjunct, a false limit, that makes one Self appear as a marked-off region. Two illustrations carry the point. The soul is like the sun reflected in water: when the water dries up, the reflection goes back to the original sun and never returns. Or it is like the space enclosed in a pot: when the pot breaks, that space simply is the great space and does not return. In the same way, when ignorance ends through the knowledge 'I am Brahman', the adjunct falls away, the soul reaches its own adjunct-free nature, and there is no return. One source presses the matching difficulty raised by the previous verse: how can scripture say the soul both 'goes' and 'does not return', when in the world going always ends in coming back, and even the daily 'merging into being' of deep sleep ends in waking? The answer is that the soul is in truth non-different from the Brahman it 'attains', so 'going' is only figurative for the turning-back of ignorance by knowledge; deep sleep does not free anyone because there the inner organ still rests in subtle form in ignorance, its own cause, and so rises again, whereas once knowledge has burned ignorance, the cause is gone and nothing rises. On this reading the very same verse is read as teaching the soul's ultimate identity with Brahman, the 'portion' being only a provisional, adjunct-made appearance. One Advaita voice frames the whole verse as an answer to a different worry, that a self-luminous Self should need no other light, and reads it through the spark-and-fire image of scripture to say the spark simply is fire, not fire's portion, so the soul too is Brahman, not literally a part.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

The soul is a real, everlasting portion of the Lord, but 'portion' is read so that it does not break the Lord's integrity: the soul has the Lord as its inner Self, and so is his 'portion' in an extended sense. The soul's own true form is veiled by the wrapping of beginningless karma-shaped ignorance; under that wrapping it becomes a soul of exceedingly contracted knowledge and lordship. As the lord of the senses with the mind as the sixth, it draws them, in conformity with its karma, hither and thither, the senses standing in a body that is a particular transformation of material nature, fitted to god, man, and the rest. One who is freed of this ignorance by the path described earlier abides in his own form; but the soul that is still a bound jiva keeps drawing the instruments according to its karma. The drawing happens at the time of taking embodiment.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

The soul is an atomic, real, everlasting portion of Purushottama, the Lord whose own form is being-consciousness-bliss (sat-cit-ananda). Of those three, the soul is by nature of the consciousness-portion (cit); its bliss-portion (ananda) is hidden, and the soul stands forth as a jiva by the concealing of bliss and the bringing-forth of not-being-the-ruler. Crucially, the soul is set apart and brought forth by the Lord's own will and for the sake of his play (lila): the 'world of the living' is itself the field the Lord manifests for his play, and the soul is drawn into it not as a fallen fragment but as the Lord's own eternal portion meant for the experience of the divine relish (rasa). The senses with the mind as the sixth are given for the sake of that rasa-tasting; the soul prepares them as a farmer lines a field. The portion-doctrine is grounded not in logic about parts but in scripture, since Brahman is reached only through the Veda: scripture nowhere settles Brahman as simply with-parts or partless, so the line of the doctrine-truth teachers is to be accepted rather than a general logical overturn. What holds the soul in the world is the Lord's own will, and what brings it home is the same Lord's grace lighting up the bliss-portion that was always its own.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

The soul is a portion of Brahman alone, but 'portion' is meant only figuratively. Because of the property of ignorance, the full and complete one is not felt; yet the state of being conscious never ceases. It is on account of this not-feeling of the whole, together with the unbroken fact of consciousness, that we speak of a 'portion' at all. In reality a having-of-portions does not hold good, for scripture says that not even a region of Brahman has passed beyond the all-form. This same figurative manner is to be applied wherever the occasion arises, so there is nothing here to dispute.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These voices read the verse as the Lord identifying the soul (jiva) who travels through devotion to the supreme abode. One frames it against the objection that, since at deep sleep and at cosmic dissolution every soul merges in the Lord, no one could be called a transmigrator: the answer is that for the soul veiled by ignorance the merging is only into the Lord 'taken-along-with-nature' (sa-prakritika), not into the pure Lord, so the same person who lays down his senses at dissolution picks them up again at creation for the sake of enjoyment, and only the knower, attaining the pure form, does not return. Another, citing the Varaha Purana, distinguishes the Lord's own-portion (svamsha) from the separated portion (vibhinnamsha) and identifies the soul as the separated portion, eternal, which in bondage draws the senses as a chain shackling its feet under the conceit 'these are mine'. A third makes the portion firmly real and not an adjunct-made appearance: he expressly rejects the pot-space and reflection models, holding that the soul, being eternal, is no fabricated thing like the space within a pot; the soul is Brahman's power, a single part of the one powerful Brahman, like the disc of Venus being a hundredth part of the moon's disc, and is a reality on account of its resemblance to a reflection; the senses it draws are effects of the ego, mind from the sattvic ego, the outer senses from the rajasic ego. The Marathi devotional voice gives the image directly: as a wind makes ripples that narrow thinking takes for portions of the sea, so the Self, giving life to dull matter and creating egoism in the body, appears as the individual soul; like the moon reflected in water though the moon is outside it, or a crystal made to look red by red powder beneath it, the soul's doership is only apparent while the Self stays beginningless and a non-doer.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These voices read the verse as a teaching about identity and the practical undoing of false identification. One follows the Advaita resolution closely: the soul is a ray of the supreme Being that enters nature and draws the five senses and mind to become embodied; the portion is only an imaginary, not a real, part, since the supreme is indivisible and would be destructible if it had real parts; in essence the soul is identical with Brahman, and when the limiting adjunct of ignorance or mind is annihilated it becomes one with Brahman and does not return. The same voice fills out the physiology, noting that 'the five senses and the mind' stand for the whole subtle body of nineteen principles, and warns that 'portion' here is like the ether in the pot, which is not cut out but remains the whole ether. A second voice reads the verse tersely as describing the subtle body (linga-sharira): the primordial particle takes the form of soul in the land of karma and draws to itself the mind and the five subtle senses. A third turns the verse wholly toward practice and devotion: the soul's being a jiva is artificial, like an actor playing a part in a drama, not the real truth; the soul never had, has not, and never could have any real relation with nature, for the Lord himself openly declares 'the jiva is mine'. On this reading the verse is the Lord's astonishing claim of nearness and ownership: he calls the soul 'my own portion', and the easiest and highest practice is to change one's sense of 'I' and 'mine' to match it, 'I am the Lord's' and 'the Lord alone is mine', handing the body, senses, mind and intellect over to the world's service while handing one's very self over to the Lord. To keep both for oneself is dishonesty and bondage; to give each its own is the honesty that is itself liberation.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas