Before the last word is given, Krishna names the only reason he is giving it: love.

Shankara's own remark stays brief; Madhusudana's fuller comment supplies the architecture.

Shankara's surviving note on this verse is little more than a threshold marker: the word is secret beyond all secrets, dearness is its ground, and the substance is left for the next verse to state. Madhusudana goes further, naming this word more secret even than action and more secret than the knowledge that is action's fruit, and explaining the repetition itself: the treatise is so profound that without taking it in as a whole, its promised turning-back of calamity cannot be gained, so the Lord, out of compassion, gathers its essence here.

Ramanuja's comment is compact and stays close to bhakti-yoga.

What survives of Ramanuja's remark ties the 'most secret' directly to the discipline of devotion, which he had already called the Gita's highest secret earlier in the text. On this reading, the verse does not open new ground; it reaffirms devotion's eminence and states, simply, that Arjuna's firm dearness to the Lord is why the supreme word is spoken again.

Reported honestly: the source is silent here.

Madhva's extant work states plainly that he offers no comment on this verse, and this page does not invent one in his name. What can be said only as a flagged, conditional extension, consistent with how he reads dearness and dependence elsewhere, is that Arjuna's fitness to receive this teaching would likely be read as a mark of his own inherent nature under the Lord's sanction, never as evidence of equal footing between them. That is offered as extrapolation, not as his recorded word.

The fragment is compressed rather than absent.

Abhinavagupta's surviving comment notes that this point, shown before only here and there, is now taken directly by the horns and shown plainly, because it is the thing most worth taking up; the mind, he says, is never sated by it. He settles, tersely, that offering oneself into Brahman is, in every way, the principal thing scripture intends. A fuller Trika reading, of the 'most secret' as a recognition already latent in awareness rather than a doctrine handed down, would be a flagged extension beyond what the fragment itself states.

Drawn from the devotional register inside Madhusudana's own fuller paragraph.

No separately authored Bhakti-school comment on this exact verse is on file here, but the devotional charge is already present in Madhusudana's language: Arjuna is dear 'exceedingly,' and told this 'though unasked.' Read in that register, the verse is less a doctrine dispensed on schedule than a gift pressed on the beloved, offered before it is even sought.

A modern-facing gloss on the same material Madhusudana supplies.

Seen as pedagogy rather than repetition for its own sake, the verse makes a simple claim: a teaching this profound cannot be absorbed in fragments, so the teacher gathers its essence and restates it directly, first ruling out every self-interested motive so that the restatement itself can be trusted as a gift and not a transaction.