Chapter 9 · Verse 5·Spoken by Krishna
न च मत्स्थानि भूतानि पश्य मे योगमैश्वरम्। भूतभृन्न च भूतस्थो ममात्मा भूतभावनः
na cha mat-sthāni bhūtāni paśhya me yogam aiśhwaram bhūta-bhṛin na cha bhūta-stho mamātmā bhūta-bhāvanaḥ
And yet beings do not dwell in me. Behold my divine power. My Self sustains and brings forth all beings, but it does not dwell in them.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
his verse deliberately reverses what Krishna has just said. In 9.4 he declared that all beings abide in him; now he says the opposite, 'the beings do not abide in Me.' The commentators agree this is not a contradiction but a paired truth. Krishna himself anticipates the objection: if you have just said beings rest in me and I pervade the world, how can you now say they do not rest in me? His answer is 'behold My sovereign yoga,' meaning look at the wonder of how this can be so. The two statements stand together precisely to point past ordinary logic to a power that holds them both.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Ramsukhdas
The reason the beings do not truly abide in him is that he is unattached, asanga, untouched by contact. Several commentators ground this in scripture, citing the Brihadaranyaka line 'the unattached one is not attached' (3.9.26). The point is that resting-in is a relation of contact, like water held in a pot, and Krishna has no such contact with anything. He bears beings without being moistened, stained, or burdened by them. So while beings depend on him, he does not depend on them and is not entangled with them; the dependence runs one way only.
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Vallabhācārya
The phrase 'behold My sovereign yoga' (pashya me yogam aishvaram) is read by all as an invitation to wonder at a unique divine power. 'Yoga' here means the power of joining: the skill of fitting together what cannot ordinarily be fitted together, of holding opposites at once. It is called 'sovereign' or 'lordly' because it belongs to the Lord alone and is found nowhere else. Many compare it to the work of a magician, who makes appear what is not really there, and emphasize that it operates by his mere will or resolve, not by any physical or material process.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Ācārya Abhinavagupta · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha
The verse names three roles Krishna plays toward beings even while not abiding in them. He is bhuta-bhrt, the bearer or upholder who sustains and supports all beings; he is bhuta-bhavana, the originator who brings beings into existence and makes them grow; and he calls all this 'My Self' (mama atma). The commentators stress the marvel that the very one who carries, generates, and nourishes everything remains outside and untouched by it. The bearing and creating are real functions; the non-abiding is equally real, and both are held by the one Self.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
The word 'My' in 'My Self' (mama atma) is read carefully so it does not suggest a self inside the Self, or a body separate from an owner. The Advaita and Bhakti commentators explain it as a figure of speech, like the common expression 'the head of Rahu,' where Rahu just is the head and the possessive is only a manner of speaking. The genitive is used despite there being no real division between Krishna's body and Krishna himself; it follows ordinary worldly usage without implying that the Lord is split into possessor and possessed.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
The non-abiding of beings is read as their ultimate unreality. Because the Self is unattached and non-dual, beings have no real connection with it at all; their seeming dependence is a superimposition, like a snake imagined on a rope, or like water and other things appearing to move in the sun reflected in the sky while the sun itself does not move. One source offers the dream image: the dreamer is not truly connected to what he himself imagines, and just so the Self is not truly connected to the beings projected on it. On this reading the whole 'bearing' and 'creating' belong to appearance; in truth the Self of being, consciousness, and bliss neither contains beings nor is contained by them, and even saying beings rest in him is only provisional speech that the verse then withdraws. One source within this school grounds the substrate-bliss in sruti ('of this very bliss other beings live by a fragment'), arguing that only because the conscious cause underlies space and the world can the insentient effect become sentient at all.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Beings are fully real and Krishna's upholding of them is real, but it does not work the way a pot upholds water by physical contact. It works 'by My resolve,' that is, by his sovereign will, which is described as made of mind. The marvel is that he upholds all beings while gaining no use or benefit from them whatsoever; the relation is entirely one-sided in his favor and entirely for their sake. The 'yoga' is precisely this: that his mere mental resolve is at once the bringer-into-being, the upholder, and the governor of all beings, a wonder impossible anywhere else and shared by no other.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
Beings do abide in the Lord, but not the way things abide on the earth by touching it; what the verse denies is a relation of contact and mutual transfer of qualities. The Lord cannot be known by touch or the other senses at all but only through scripture (the revealed word). On this reading 'My Self' marks a special point: when the Lord's unmanifest form is in view, one must not mistake it for a body separate from him as our bodies are separate from us. His body just is his greatness; he is 'of the great glory' whose very body is his power. This is supported from the Moksha-dharma: 'He is not seen by the eye, nor touched by the touch,' and 'My self is the body itself, the maker of beings; it is the glory-body of the great power.'
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
Beings rest in Krishna as the akshara, the imperishable who shines in them as their very 'is' and who is the material cause of their name and form; their standing is by his own supporting power and nothing else. Yet he is not dependent on them and bears no pot-and-water contact with them. The key is that the world is the Lord's own free self-becoming for the sake of play (lila): even within non-difference he holds forth difference, for play, so that beings stand in the play with the conceit of being other than the player, while the player himself remains untouched by the play's conditions. This same yoga, when it bewilders others, is elsewhere called maya. The sources name this the central declaration of the chapter and the heart of the raja-vidya, and say the devoted seeker (pushti-bhakta) should settle his contemplation precisely here.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Kashmir Shaivism
The reason beings 'do not rest in Me' is epistemic: those blinded by ignorance do not see the truth. The deluded do not recognize the supreme Lord, whose nature is unbroken awareness, as the ground in which the discernment of every thing is established; instead they take some measured, limited thing as the ground, thinking 'I am Devadatta, a thin man,' 'I know this,' 'this stands on the earth.' So the verse's denial points to how the limited mind misplaces the ground of all knowing. The 'sovereign yoga' is then the Lord's absolute freedom (svatantrya), a power whose working is unsurpassed and wondrous, the freedom to join things together as he wills.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
These commentators dwell on the analogy of the embodied living being. The jiva bears and protects its body, but because it identifies with the body through ego (ahamkara) it comes to dwell within it and be bound to it. Krishna does exactly the reverse: he bears and protects all beings, yet because he is wholly without ego (nir-ahamkara) and free of attachment, he does not dwell within them. He is host and nourisher of the universe without ever signing the deed of ownership. One source adds the contrast that you grow weary under a heavy burden, but no weariness arises in him, because beings are not joined to him as burdens; his upholding is done by sovereign yoga, the infallibility of his will, not by the labor of his form, and cites sruti that under the governance of the imperishable the sun, moon, heaven, and earth stand held apart. One source within this school presses the point furthest, in a chain of images, saying that even 'beings rest in Me' is finally untrue, for there is nothing besides his being; pots are shaped by the potter's mind not quarried from earth, waves are the wind's doing not stored in the sea, cloth comes from the weaver's purpose not held inside cotton, so the appearance of separate beings is imagination worked upon his pure being, and when that imagination ceases only his undivided Self remains.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Modern
These voices read the verse as the great paradox of God stated for the human mind. One holds, in Advaitic terms, that the formless Self can have no real connection with formed objects any more than a rope has with the snake imagined on it; the connection of Self and body is illusory, and yet, being the efficient cause, the Self still brings forth and supports all beings. One frames it as God soothing humanity by revealing all his aspects through paradox: all beings are in him because all creation is his, and yet not in him because he transcends and is really not the author of it all, and he adds the devotional note that he truly dwells in his devotees and, by their reckoning, not in those who deny him. One reads it plainly as divine Action: the Atman that created all things, though embodied in them, is not in them. One non-sectarian devotional voice steps back to the chapter's frame, holding that the manifest (vyakta, sakara) and unmanifest (avyakta, nirakara) are two modes of one Lord, that the saguna and nirguna distinctions belong to schools and not to the reality, and that 'beings rest in me, and I am not in them, and they are not in me' are paired counter-truths spoken of the one all-pervading Supreme.
Swami Sivananda · Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
How can both be true at once, that everything rests in God and that nothing rests in God, without one of the statements being merely empty words?
Krishna raises this very objection himself and answers it not with a logical resolution but with an invitation: 'behold My sovereign yoga.' The commentators take this seriously. The two statements are not careless; they are placed together on purpose to point past ordinary either-or thinking toward a power found nowhere else, the power of joining what cannot be joined, of holding opposites at once.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
The key that unlocks the pair is the word asanga, unattached. 'Resting in' means a relation of contact, the way water sits in a pot and soaks it. Beings depend on God in that they arise from him and are held by him; but God has no contact with them, no soaking, no burden, no benefit drawn from them. So the dependence runs one way: they rest on him, he does not rest on them. Both clauses are exact once you see that one speaks of their need of him and the other of his freedom from them.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Baladeva
Several commentators offer pictures to make this thinkable. The sun appears to shimmer in moving water while the real sun never moves; a dreamer holds no real contact with the things he dreams; the sky supports a whole imagined city without becoming part of it. Each image shows the same shape: a ground that truly carries an appearance while remaining wholly outside its conditions. That is the wonder the verse asks you to behold rather than to flatten into one tidy formula.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Contemplation
Hold the two images side by side. A living being bears and protects its own body, but because it clings to the body as 'mine,' it sinks into the body and is bound by everything that happens to it. The Lord bears and protects all beings just as truly, yet he does not sink into them, because he has no ego and no attachment. The difference is not the bearing; the difference is the clinging. So the contemplation this verse offers is to watch where your own caring becomes clutching. You can carry your responsibilities, your relationships, your work, and still not be lodged inside them and tossed about by them. The freedom is not in dropping the load; it is in carrying without the ego that says 'this is mine and I am caught in it.'
Sit with this · Śrīla Viśvanātha
Pull up a chair.
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