The line between the unreal and the real, the ground beneath endurance.

Advaita Vedānta

The unreal is not just impermanent but indeterminable and finally false, like the snake mistakenly seen on a rope or the silver imagined in mother-of-pearl. The entire dual world is superimposed on the one self-luminous Being and can be cancelled by knowledge, just as the imagined silver is cancelled when the shell is known. To answer how the not-Self does not simply count as real when we equally cognise it, these commentators offer their signature analysis of the two cognitions: in every perception there are two awarenesses sharing one locus, an awareness of being ('it is') and an awareness of a particular ('a pot'). The 'is' never strays from object to object, but the 'pot' does, so the particular is unreal and bare Being alone is real; when the pot breaks, the 'is' still shines in the cloth. The real is therefore the one undivided Being, and liberation comes when the maya-imagined unreal ceases.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Asat and sat here mean specifically the body and the self, not bare existence versus illusion, and the contrast is between a thing whose nature is destruction and a thing whose nature is indestructibility. The body is an insentient (achit) thing whose very nature is perishability; the self is the conscious (chit) one whose very nature is permanence. These commentators insist the verse is about the difference of two real natures, the perishable and the imperishable, since that is exactly the discernment a man deluded about body and self needs to hear. They explicitly reject reading the verse as a proof that the effect pre-exists in the cause, and they ground the body-self contrast in the Vishnu Purana, where 'exists' denotes consciousness and 'does not exist' the inert. One of them adds that the all-cancelling sense, where even the self could be called asat, applies only to a special state and to the loss of name and form, not to the self's essence, which is sat.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

Here asat and sat are read as two distinct eternal realities, not as body and self and not as false and true. 'Of the unreal' means of the unmanifest material cause, prakriti, and 'of the real' means Brahman; the verse declares that neither of them ever ceases to be. So both prakriti and Brahman are beginningless and eternal, as the Vishnu Purana says that prakriti, the person, and time are eternal. On this reading the word 'asat' names prakriti because the cause is of unmanifest form, and the Bhagavata speaks of her as having the form of both the existent and the non-existent. The two halves of the verse are kept as separate denials for emphasis, marking that an inferential rule holds in both cases, and the 'conclusion' (anta) is the final verdict of beginningless eternality, confirmed by tradition as well as scripture.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Modern

This commentator reads the verse straightforwardly as teaching that the existence of the real and the non-existence of the unreal are both permanent, so that the visible name-and-form world and its pleasures and pains are essentially destructible while the Self is everlasting. He expressly warns against confusing this with the doctrine that an effect pre-exists in its cause: although 'that which is cannot cease to be' looks like that doctrine, the verse is not about one thing being produced from another, but only about the standing fact that the real never lapses and the unreal never gains true being. He also examines, by way of example, the Dvaita way of splitting the first line so that both real and unreal come out permanent, and judges it a stretched reading rather than the plain sense, since the opposed words 'being' and 'non-being' track the opposed words 'real' and 'unreal,' and the eighteenth verse will plainly call the body destructible.

Lokmanya Tilak

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the line as fixing a real ontological structure without dissolving the world into mere illusion. The soul is sat, the real; one of them holds that the body too, in its proper sense, is held within the Lord, Brahman, so pure non-dualism keeps the distinction rather than calling the world false. The other turns the verse toward devotion: the unreal is the merely worldly, which has no supra-mundane being, while the real is the supra-mundane reality belonging to Bhagavan, which is never destroyed. He gives the gopis as the illustration, some seated in their homes and some joined to the Lord's dance, and says those whose vision is true, who are fit to behold Bhagavan, have seen the inmost fruit; so one should bear pleasure and pain because by such forbearance no body fit for the Lord is lost.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators take asat and sat as the body and the individual soul (jiva) and read the verse to establish the lasting difference between the changeable body and the changeless soul. One stresses that grief and delusion are not properties of the soul at all but are fashioned by ignorance, so for the real soul there is no being of body, bodily affairs, or grief, and no destruction of the soul itself; hence neither Bhishma and the others nor Arjuna can really perish, and grief is groundless. The other frames the same body-soul discernment as the necessary first lesson for everyone before higher knowledge, grounds it in the Vishnu Purana where 'does not exist' denotes the inert body and 'exists' denotes the conscious Self, and likewise rejects reading the verse as a proof that the effect pre-exists in the cause.

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva

Kashmir Shaivism

Rather than dividing things into a real and an unreal class, this commentator argues by dilemma that neither arising nor perishing is finally coherent, so there is nothing to grieve over in the coming and going of states. Take 'arising': if it means the non-existent gaining a nature, that is impossible, for having the nature of the non-existent is having no nature at all, and the natureless cannot be made to have a nature, just as the non-blue cannot be made blue; and if it means what already exists gaining its nature, then since such a thing never comes to non-being it is simply eternal, and again nothing is lost. Take 'going': the non-existent is just non-existent, and the existent cannot turn into the non-existent, for a thing does not give up its nature; if it were non-existent at the second moment it would be so at the first too, and nothing would ever be. When a hammer breaks a pot, if the destruction is something apart from the pot then nothing has happened to the pot, and if it is not apart from it then there is no such thing as destruction; at most the thing is unseen, as under a cloth, not made otherwise. Scripture is cited that the nature of things does not turn aside, as the sun's heat does not.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta