Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as collapsing the path of knowledge and the path of devotion into one. Krishna is known as both the cause of the world (bhutadi) and the imperishable, changeless reality (avyaya), and one of them is glad to read the single-minded devotee (ekanta-bhakta) and the knower of Brahman (brahma-jnani) as the very same person, precisely because the one Krishna is both the cause of the world and the undecaying ground. The 'imperishable' is given a striking gloss: as the shell is the substrate that appears as the silver that is mistakenly seen in it, Krishna is the substrate of all forms while himself never undergoing the modification, so he is ever changeless. The greatness of the soul is understood mainly as a purified inner organ no longer driven by petty desire, refined over many births.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here the stress falls on grace and on a personal Lord whose true being is beyond speech and mind. These souls become great by heaps of merit they have made, and then, coming to Krishna for refuge, have every bond of sin shattered; the divine nature is something they enter through that surrender. The Lord they know has descended into human form out of supreme compassion, to protect the good, and his name, deeds, and own form lie beyond speech and thought. Their love is so excessive that mind, self, and outer organs cannot stand up at all apart from his worship, which becomes their single purpose. One of these voices reads the verse structurally, as naming in four phrases (great soul, refuge in divine nature, single mind, knowledge of the imperishable source) the very candidate the rest of the chapter will go on to describe.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators read the verse within a tightly argued context about who hates the Lord and who does not. The point of describing 'the gods,' the highest order of souls, is to show that, unlike the demons and their kind, these others do not hate Krishna. One of them takes 'the gods' as illustrative of the highest order of souls in general, and presses the logical question of why the words 'they worship' are even needed: it would have been enough to say the others do not hate. The answer is that the verse means to set forth the very nature of the gods, and that nature in turn is meant to establish the absence of hatred in them. So for this school the verse is doing careful work in a graded scheme of souls, not flattening all worshippers into one.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read mahatma in a strong, almost mystical sense and tie the verse to liberation. For one, the great soul is born in a final birth, his sins shattered by the accumulated good deeds of birth upon birth and by his refuge in the Lord, and from that point he is fit for liberation because his purity of being is now set; he worships the purushottama, the supreme person, whose very form is bliss in hands, feet, face and the rest, following the teaching handed down by the feet of the acharyas, and his mind rests on no other, not even on the imperishable (akshara) as a separate goal. The other gives mahatma a bold reading: these are the ones for whom 'aham eva,' 'I myself,' is the great Self, those for whom the Lord himself is their very atman; and the divine nature they take refuge in is the play-formed nature, or the nature whose very form is the gods.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

The devotional commentators dwell on the human form of Krishna and on the texture of the love itself. One insists that these souls, though human, fix their hearts on Krishna precisely in his human form, knowing him to be the imperishable and eternal cause of all, including Brahma, Rudra and the others; their minds have become broad and fathomless through the company of the good, so that they take no pleasure even in his thousand-headed cosmic form, preferring the intimate human one. Another paints the great souls at length: their pure hearts are holy places where the Lord dwells, renunciation waits on them even in sleep, the ecstasy of God's love makes them spurn even the treasure of liberation, and they become one with the essence of divine life and yet still worship, with a devotion free from every touch of duality.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator reads the verse as the opening of a span that runs down to a later phrase about being 'facing every way,' and uses it to mark two legitimate modes of worship. The divine nature is the sattvic one. Worshipping here means worship with outer substances, that is, with sacrifices using material offerings; but others worship the Lord by the sacrifice of knowledge alone. So some worship in oneness, through knowledge, and some in manifold ways, through the yoga of action. The point he draws out is that these are not rival paths: all of them alike have the Lord for their one goal.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

The modern voices keep the verse plain and practical. One renders it simply: the noble souls who have taken shelter in a godly nature recognize Krishna as the supreme inexhaustible source of all created beings, and, believing there is no one else, worship him. Another highlights an alternate reading of mahatma in which the great souls are those whose pure minds the Lord has made into his own special abode; he dwells in their pure minds, and they have sincere devotion, divine sattvic nature, and knowledge of the Self. A third stresses the lived steadiness of such a devotee: he has firmly accepted the Lord as his own, his worship is single (ananya) and continuous, and from that his whole conduct, speech and deeds fall naturally into place, so that constant praise of God is for him the very breath of life and never a thing he must force.

Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas