Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as non-difference (abheda): the Lord is the one universal essence, and the many particulars are 'strung' or 'woven' on him as their material reality. One commentator presses the problem honestly. Normally a thread and beads, or clay and pot, are different things in a material-and-effect relation, yet the unchanging Lord seems unable to stand to the changing world that way. His answer is that the world is to be compared to a dream, to maya, to a juggler's display, or to the snake mistakenly seen in a rope: on that comparison the Lord's unchanging nature and the world's appearing are both saved. The point of the worship-language is that this teaching is given for meditation, so one should not press the individual glories too hard but use them to reach the one essence.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the relation is that of the inner ruler (antaryamin) and his body. All these things have arisen from the Lord, are subordinate to him, and abide in him as his body; so it is the Lord alone who abides, having them as his mode. The taste of water is not a self-standing chemical property and not a mere figure of speech; it is the Lord's presence as taste, by virtue of which the water possesses that property at all. One commentator names two misreadings this rules out: the merely metaphorical (the Lord is just praised as if he were the taste) and the merger (the taste simply is the Lord with no taste-locus left). The true middle path is that the Lord, indwelling each thing, is the essence by whose presence the outer thing has its property; the property is genuinely the thing's, but only because the Lord is in it.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

This commentator reads the verse soberly within its context. The flavor (rasa) is the essence by which the body is nourished, and in this section the Lord extols precisely those things that are the causes of the world's continuance. He distinguishes this section from the later section on divine manifestations, where excellences are taught whether or not they are causes; here the stress falls on the world-sustaining essences. Whatever is genuinely worthy of contemplation is taught, and because each item is worthy of contemplation there is no redundancy in the list.

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

These commentators insist the difference between the Lord and things is preserved even here. Water, taste, and the rest do depend on the Lord and are objects of his enjoyment, but the Lord is in a special way the regulator of the natural properties such as taste, of their being essences, and of their being natural properties at all. The point of singling out 'taste in water' rather than just 'water' is threefold: the properties (taste and the like) are the non-adventitious essential natures and cores of their substances; the Lord is the special enjoyer of these essences; and these are fit images for worship, where non-difference language is normal even though real difference holds. They handle the later 'purer food' passages by saying the Lord enjoys a subtle essence beyond the reach of the embodied self's senses, so the scriptures denying that he eats refer only to gross eating, and the difference taught is a difference of persons (Lord and jiva), not merely of states. They also restrict his enjoyment to the pure: he is the 'sacred scent,' for foul scents, even if experienced, are not causes of fruit.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the chain as abheda-shruti and push it toward devotional savour. The doctrine is not that the Lord is a substrate underneath some quality residing elsewhere; rather the very taste of water, the very light of the luminaries, the very Om of the Vedas, the very sound of space, the very manhood in men is none other than Purushottama himself, become these things by his own will. One distinguishes two paths: on the maryada (rule-bound) path the Lord stands as the inner ruler, but on the pushti (grace) path he is the rasa itself, the savour and the very savouring of it together. The shruti 'he is rasa; having attained that rasa one becomes blissful' is brought to its highest application: the Lord is rasa, and tasting him is the very being of bliss for the devotee. The other develops each item as a specific bliss-contact: water's gladdening coolness, the luminaries' light, the Veda's power to awaken devotional feeling (bhava), the sound of the Lord's flute in ether, and the share of the purusha by which a person becomes fit for loving service (bhajana).

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators read the chain firmly as abheda-shruti and tie it to the Lord's powers (vibhutis). 'Not I am like the taste, but I am the taste': the taste is the rasa-tanmatra by which the Lord supports the waters and abides in them, without which they could not subsist; likewise light, Om as the root of all the Vedas in their uttered form, the sound-essence of space, and manhood as fruitful effort, for on effort men stand. One gives the vivid image: gems are not the thread, but the thread is in the gems, and that thread is Vasudeva. One frames it as the Lord entering his own effect as inner controller, abiding sometimes as cause and sometimes as the very essence of effects like human beings. The Marathi voice gathers the whole list and closes that, through all these differing creatures and their differing ways of living, he dwells as the one abiding Self, identical in unity of being.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator reads each item as the undivided, common ground that lies before particular differences break out. The taste he is, is the taste tasted everywhere, the common savour in which the distinction of sweet, sour, and the rest has not yet arisen. The light he is, is free of softness and fierceness. Most strikingly, on 'sound in space' he offers a yogic reading: beyond ordinary sound, which is a quality of ether produced by striking bodies, there is the sound arising from the ether-quality alone, free of any apparatus of striking, to be known by yogins who with attentive heart move in the ether of the cave of Brahman, the unstruck sound (anahata) that follows along the whole body of the Veda. That, he says, is the very truth of the Blessed One. And manhood is the splendour by which one is acknowledged everywhere as 'this is a man.'

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These commentators present the verse plainly, mostly without sectarian machinery. One renders it directly: in the Lord as sapidity the water is woven, as light the sun and moon, as Om all the Vedas, as virility all men, with the whole world woven into him as cloth into the warp. Another develops it experientially: once you accept that the Lord is the cause of everything seen, heard, held, and known, and that nothing has independent existence apart from him, then a natural taste for him arises and his worship begins of itself, just as a greedy man's taste turns naturally to money once he treats money as the highest thing. He unpacks the tanmatra logic concretely: water is born from, abides in, and dissolves into the rasa-tanmatra, and that rasa is the Lord himself; the same for the light-power of moon and sun born of the rupa-tanmatra.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas