Advaita Vedānta

The Lord seen 'everywhere' is Vasudeva understood as the one non-dual Self of all beings, and the vision is the realization of the oneness of that Self. The seer and the Lord are not two: 'I Myself am the one who sees the oneness of the Self of all,' and one's own Self is dear and never lost to oneself. A careful problem is faced and answered: if the Lord is eternal, He does not perish for anyone, knower or non-knower alike, so what does 'I am not lost to him' add? The answer is that for the ignorant the Lord, though present as their very Self, is veiled by nescience and so is 'as if lost', existing yet unrecognized; for the knower the veil is gone, so the Lord stands directly evident. One voice adds that once root-nescience is destroyed it is seedless and cannot return, so the knower's realization is final; another presses that the bare 'that'-meaning (the Lord) becomes an object of immediate yoga-born perception even apart from the sentence-knowledge of identity. One Advaitin reads 'not lost' simply as 'not far off, ever directly known' and rejects forcing in any special yoga-born perception.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

The relation is not identity but supreme likeness. The liberated self, having shaken off merit and demerit, abides in its own pure form and reaches a 'likeness to Me' (the stainless one reaching the supreme likeness). Because the self is now like the Lord, seeing either one is seeing that the other too is of this kind, so the seeing carries across both ways and neither vanishes from the other. The 'Me' is the supreme Self in its Lord-form, the inner ruler (antaryamin) of all beings. The verse is to be heard not as a metaphor of perpetual contemplation but as a statement of the actual inner stance: the Lord, seen as the Self of all, genuinely stands present to the seer, and the chapter's growing bhakti-load is here first sounded.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

'I do not perish for him' means the Lord is always the bearer of the devotee's gaining and keeping (his welfare and security), and 'he does not perish for Me' means he is always the Lord's devotee. The seer and the Lord remain distinct; the language of non-loss is a conventional figure drawn from the master-servant idiom: 'even with a master present, one is masterless if he is not protected, and even with a servant present, he is no servant if he does not serve.' The 'perishing' is thus a figurative non-existence by likeness to not performing one's proper function; here, since both do perform their function, no real loss occurs and there is no need to search for any further purpose. The Garuda Purana confirms: 'he who sees Me, the same in all beings, his devotion is unshaken, and I bear his gaining and keeping.'

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Bhedabheda

The plain mutual non-vanishing is affirmed: for the one who sees the Lord everywhere, the Lord does not vanish, and he does not vanish from the Lord. The distinctive note is the close: the seer 'comes to be of the very nature of My own being.' The seer takes on the Lord's own nature, holding identity and the seer's own standing together rather than collapsing one into the other.

Śrī Bhāskara

Śuddhādvaita

This is the chapter's high disclosure of Bhagavan, and the right non-difference is the devotional (pushti) kind, where non-difference means loving non-separation, not a contentless merger. The devotee sees Vasudeva as the very content of all and is in turn seen by Vasudeva in His own grace-form: by manifesting bliss and taking the four-armed and other forms, the Lord comes into the devotee's very presence and bestows favor with the gaze of grace. The seer's own conscious portion is raised to the supreme person by the Lord's own self-coming, not by the yogin's reach. Crucially, mere identity-meditation that does not place the bond on Vasudeva is dismissed as a dark, tantric variety; the reciprocity holds because the seeing holds and the seeing holds because the love holds, keeping the lover unbroken within the beloved through both the phase of separation and the phase of union.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

'Perishing' is read as failing to do what is to be done, that is, failing to manifest. The supreme Self's nature is to make all things shine forth; the whole host of things shines only as set within Him. For one who does not see this all-pervading form, the supreme Self has 'fled', because His own form is not made manifest, and such a one has himself 'perished' from the Self, since a thing held apart from the Self would have no shining at all. But for one who sees the Lord as all-pervading, the Lord has not perished, for He shines forth by His own form; and when this person's being-a-seer is wholly full, seeing the things in Him, he too has not perished from the supreme Self. Non-loss is thus the fullness of luminous manifestation on both sides.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

The verse is read as the devotional heart of the whole chapter. The principal cause of the Self-knowledge that sees all beings as the Self is the worship of the Lord as the Self of all; that meditation flowers, by the Lord's own grace, into the mutual unconcealment of devotee and Vasudeva. The Lord becomes directly present to the seer, beholds him with the very eye of compassion (kripa), and takes him under His grace, so that between them no veil remains. For such a worshipper the Lord is never imperceptible, and because the Lord's perceptibility to him is everlasting, the worshipper never at any time falls away; there is mutual direct realization between the two at all times.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva

Modern

One modern voice reads the verse as plain identity: the Lord and the seer of unity become one and the same, never leaving each other's presence, the Lord dwelling in him and he in the Lord. Another distinguishes two standpoints across this verse and the previous one: the earlier description, using 'atman', is from the imperceptible, metaphysical point of view, while this verse, using the first-person 'I', is from the perceptible, devotional point of view; both mean the same thing, and this vision of the identity of Brahman with the Self is the foundation of both Release and Karma-Yoga. A third, devotional voice frames the seer as the perfected devotee (siddha bhakta) in whose sight no reality other than the Lord's reality remains in the least; he sees the Lord in all places, times, beings and circumstances, and sees everything within the Lord, illustrated by Krishna himself becoming the calves and cowherd boys, and by Arjuna beholding the whole world within the Lord's cosmic form.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas