Take up this teaching in full, with faith, and you become exceedingly dear.

Read as the seal of the whole middle group of six chapters, on the discrimination of the supreme reality.

The Lord you hold as supreme is finally the imperishable Self, Brahman without distinctions, identical with your own true Self, and the worship described in the chapter ripens toward knowing that truth directly. Notice the careful structure: in the one who has already realized the Self, the qualities named here arise on their own, simple signs of what has dawned, not means still being used. For you, if you are still seeking that knowledge, the same qualities are to be cultivated by deliberate effort as the very means to it. The chapter closes, then, by handing you both a description of the goal and the practice that leads there.

Read as the discipline of devotion, already carrying the sweetness of the goal it leads to.

The nectar of dharma named here is the discipline of devotion itself, worshipped exactly as taught earlier in the chapter, the mind entered fully into the Lord. Hear the double sense in nectar: this discipline both brings you to the goal and is already, in its own sweetness, equal to the goal you seek, so the practice and the prize are not two separate things waiting to be joined later. You need not treat your devotion as a cold means to a distant end. It is already tasting of what it promises.

Read on a close word-analysis, with dharma itself meaning Vishnu.

Take dharma itself to mean Vishnu: what has him for its object, and does not swerve from Vishnu-centered duty, is dharmya. This Vishnu-directed practice is the nectar, for it destroys the round of death and rebirth outright, the very opposite of death rather than merely its postponement. This is not some unseen, stored-up merit awaiting a future harvest. It is the present practice you engage in now, and it is, in itself, the means by which one bound by transmigration is freed.

Read on the force of the word but, lifting wholehearted longing above partial virtue.

Weigh the opening but carefully. The devotees described in the verses before this one are each grounded in some particular quality, freedom from hatred, friendliness, contentment, taken more or less on its own. But those who long for the whole relish of devotion together, who take up the entire teaching rather than a fragment that suits their temperament, stand higher still, and that is precisely why the word exceedingly is used of them here. Completeness of longing, not perfection of any single virtue, is what this line rewards.

Read as devotion itself, and the peace it brings, being what the Lord loves.

The qualities gathered here are not ordinary worldly virtues that anyone might cultivate for their own sake. They are qualities born of devotion and of the peace that devotion brings, since the Lord is pleased by devotion itself, not by virtue considered apart from it. To take up this nectar with faith, holding the Lord as the one goal, is to let devotion do its own quiet work in you, and it is this, rather than any tally of good conduct, that the Lord answers with his most direct word of love.

Read as a single teaching that serves two stages of the same path at once.

Do not read this verse as describing someone else, already finished, while you remain outside its promise. The same catalogue of qualities works two ways: a spontaneous, effortless mark in the one who has realized the Self, and a discipline still to be taken up deliberately by the seeker who has not. The chapter closes, then, by speaking at once to the one who has arrived and to the one still on the way, and it withholds its dearest word from neither.