Advaita Vedānta

For these commentators the two natures are the Lord's limiting adjuncts (upadhi), not real internal parts of him. The Lord appears as cause of the world by association with these adjuncts, much as a single reality looks varied through limiting conditions. The lower nature is insentient and the higher, though conscious, has only limited knowledge; so neither can be the cause of all on its own. The all-knowing Lord alone is fittingly the cause. One develops a striking image: the world's appearance is like the display in a dream, where the dreamer alone is at once the material out of which the dream is made, its substrate and object, and also the one who sees it. So the Lord, who possesses maya (the world-producing power), is both the stuff of the world and its witness, while remaining one. Some in this group also widen the meaning past mere world-making: the Lord is the cause of being, knowing, and enjoying for all, praised by seers as maker, protector, dissolver, ruler, and revealer, the enjoyer by his very nature of bliss.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the two natures, matter and the conscious person, are real and are the body of the Lord, not mere appearances or adjuncts to be explained away. The world has the two natures for its womb, and those two natures in turn have the supreme Person for their womb; so the world is the Lord's, owned by him, and he is its arising, its dissolution, and its owner. This is backed by named scriptural texts describing how the manifest dissolves stage by stage back into the supreme God, and how the primal matter and the person both arise from the form of Vishnu and dissolve into the supreme Self. The movement of the verse is read as going from the aggregate (all beings as a class) to the distributed Lord who is source and dissolver of the whole. The prabhava is taken specifically as the material cause (upadana) in respect of the two natures the Lord owns, and the pralaya as the gathering of the manifest back into the unmanifest at the end of the cosmic age.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

This commentator reads the two natures as genuinely both born from the Lord and genuinely real: the insentient nature transforms in the play of cause and effect, while the sentient nature persists as the enjoyer of the fruits earned by its own action. Both are related to the Lord precisely because both are originated from him. He grounds the Lord's being the root cause firmly in scripture rather than reasoning, citing 'Existence alone was this in the beginning' and 'That Self perceived', words that fix the cause as conscious. He adds a sharp epistemic point: no one can establish by mere inference the world's cause, which lies utterly beyond the senses, because such inference is open to the faults of being unproven, inconclusive, and self-contradictory.

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

These commentators read the verse as expanding the Lord's sovereignty rather than asserting any identity between him and the world. The point is 'not merely' that the two natures are in his power; he is the cause of their arising, their being, their perceiving, and is their enjoyer. They are careful to deny that the verse states a direct identity of the Lord with the world's properties of arising and dissolving. Just as a father enjoys the birth of a son or the fall of a foe as causes of his happiness, so the Lord is called source and dissolver by way of being the enjoyer, the one of the form of happiness. They guard the Lord against any defect: the happiness said to 'arise' through enjoyment in fact always exists, and his activities exist as ever-present potency, so he undergoes no real change and lacks nothing. On this basis they explicitly reject the reading that says merely 'because his two natures are the womb of all beings, therefore he is the arising and dissolution of the world', calling that gloss laughable.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

For these commentators the verse marks the world as nothing but a real transformation (parinama) of the Lord's own being, not an illusory appearance. Since rising and passing belong to the two natures, and those two are his, the whole world in its arising and ceasing is his alone, and no second cause is to be granted at all. One develops the language of divine play (lila): every being is fit for the Lord's play because nothing falls outside his twin power; the bringing-forth and the withdrawal are both the play of one Lord, two movements of a single sport. The instruction to 'hold this near' is read warmly as a conviction to be cherished and nourished in the depth of the heart, since the source of all is the Lord's very portion.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators stress that the higher nature, the conscious soul, is specifically a portion of the Lord (mad-amsha), and that both natures are his powers (shakti) arisen from him. The insentient nature transforms into the body; the conscious nature, being a portion of the Lord, enters bodies as the enjoyer and bears them up by its own karma. Because both powers have come to be from the Lord, he alone is the supreme cause (parama-karana) of the entire world along with its nature, and equally that into which it dissolves, in whom those powers reside. One identifies the two as the power of illusion and the power that is the living being. One develops a vivid Marathi image of creation as a mint: subtle nature joins the gross elements and strikes out the countless coins of individual beings, four stamps and eighty-four lakh classes, all of equal worth though differently classed; the same nature later melts them back, turning the wheel of action by each one's karma, and this whole nature is an appearance grounded in the Lord's divine being.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator reads 'bear it home' as an experiential instruction: through sustained practice, let the truth that the Lord (Vasudeva) is the origin and dissolution of all become a lived nearness to one's own self, not just an idea. The emphatic 'I' shows that the Lord, though distinct from nature, from the individual person, and from the supreme Person, nonetheless runs through all of them in every way; so there is no real doctrinal split between the Sankhya and Yoga accounts. He offers the image of gems strung on a thread: just as the thread, its own form unnoticed, stands hidden within and holds all the gems together, so the Lord is present everywhere while remaining unseen.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These commentators keep close to the plain sense while drawing in supporting scripture. One aligns the verse with the Brahma Sutra's definition of Brahman as that from which the origin, sustenance, and dissolution of the world proceed, and uses the dream analogy: as the mind is both the material cause and the seer of dream-objects, so the Lord is both the material cause of the world and its witness, and also its instrumental cause. One renders it simply: from both natures all beings are created, and the Lord is the origin (prabhava) and end (pralaya) of the entire cosmos. One stresses that existence and stirring come to all things from the supreme Self alone; reading prabhava chiefly as the instrumental cause (nimitta-karana), since the whole creation came about by the Lord's will, just as a potter is the maker of a pot and a goldsmith of ornaments, and grounding this in 'May I become many' from the Upanishad.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas