Arjuna asks which devotion knows union best: the one that holds a form, or the one that reaches past every form.

Based on a brief surviving frame rather than a developed argument on this specific verse.

What has come down to us from Shankara here is short: two classes of devotee are named, the ever-yoked who worship the Lord's manifest form, and the renouncers who worship the imperishable Brahman as unmanifest, with Krishna turning to the latter only afterward. The larger Advaita claim, that these are one Brahman approached under two aspects, belongs to how the chapter is developed by the tradition more broadly, not to what this fragment itself states. Read honestly, it gives you the shape of the question, not yet the shape of an answer.

Read as a question of swiftness toward a shared reaching.

Ramanuja reads the first devotee as worshipping the full Lord, an ocean of blissful qualities and unmatched beauty, easy to approach and true in every resolve. The second worships not a separate impersonal absolute but the inmost self in its own form, called unmanifest only because the senses cannot show it. He reads Arjuna's question as turning on speed: which worship reaches its goal fastest, a point confirmed when Krishna soon says he becomes, without delay, the deliverer of those whose minds have entered him.

On the reading that two distinct beings, not one reality twice, are named.

Madhva reads the unmanifest as naming a real being, Shri, whose worship scripture itself calls a genuine path to release. On this reading the two devotees serve two different beings, the Lord and Shri, and the question only makes sense because of that real difference; taken as one and the same Lord, the question would collapse into meaningless repetition. He holds that Arjuna, already certain the Lord's worship stands higher, asks chiefly to draw out the reasoning for those who will hear it after him.

A single surviving line, honestly kept short rather than expanded past its source.

What remains of Abhinavagupta's comment on this verse is brief: the word thus marks a distinction between those who worship Brahman together with the Lord and those who worship the bare self alone. Nothing more of his own words survives here to build on. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading more broadly, a bare self worshipped in isolation might be read as an incomplete recognition, since the self this school describes elsewhere is never truly isolated, always already lit by the Lord's own freedom, but that extension goes beyond what this fragment itself says, and should be held as an extrapolation, not as Abhinavagupta's stated view of this verse.

Read as the chapter's own reason for asking: to weigh the texture of two devotions.

Sridhara reads the whole chapter as built to settle exactly this question, and this verse as the moment it is finally put plainly: worship of the formless without qualities, or worship of the Lord who has form, qualities, and can be loved as a person known through relationship. Because both have already earned high praise, the question is not idle, and Sridhara leans toward an answer already implicit in the asking: a mind that can hold a form has something warm to return to that a mind reaching only for the formless does not.

Read as a personal request for clarity, not an abstract ranking of schools.

Madhusudana traces the question to one exact seam: Krishna's closing word in the previous chapter, me, which elsewhere in this teaching can mean either the formless reality or the Lord with form. Both usages genuinely occur, and unless sorted by who is fit for which, they seem to clash. Arjuna, as a serious seeker, wants to know concretely which is meant for him, and asks so that he, and every seeker who reads this after him, can know which path is truly his own.