No cutting, burning, wetting, or drying can enter the Self at all.

Advaita Vedānta

The Advaita readers take 'all-pervading' in its full, literal sense: the Self is spatially omnipresent, like space (akasha), with no boundary of place. They support this with scripture: 'all-pervading like ether and eternal,' 'one, motionless like a tree, it stands in heaven,' 'partless, actionless, at peace.' Several add a sharp argument: whatever can be modified is limited, and whatever is limited is not all-pervading; since this Self is all-pervading it cannot be modified, and being unmodifiable it is eternal. One commentator anticipates the objection that atoms too are called eternal yet are not all-pervading, and sets it aside on the ground that atoms are not established by valid evidence at all. A further refinement: although such omnipresence and changelessness most naturally describe the supreme (tat), this verse is teaching the disciple's own inmost Self (the 'tvam' of 'tat tvam asi'), and the identity of the two is real only when all distinction of ruler and ruled is dropped, two pure consciousnesses with nothing between them. On this reading the weapons cannot cut the Self because the Self is its very inner controller, that which gives weapons their being and their light; how could what lends them existence become the object of their work?

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

Dvaita

The Dvaita reading insists that 'eternal, all-pervading' and the rest belong, in the first place, to the Lord, and to the individual soul only derivatively. The soul is the Lord's reflection (pratibimba), and a faithful reflection shares, where nothing forbids it, the properties of its original; so the soul is unfit for cutting and the rest because the Lord whose reflection it is, possessing eternality and all-pervasion, is unfit for them. This 'reflection' is carefully distinguished from the rival accounts that make the reflection wholly identical with, or wholly different from, the original; here the soul is genuinely different from the Lord, and that very Lord-dependent likeness of an utterly distinct soul is what scripture calls the soul's being His 'portion' (amsha), as 'a portion, because of the statement of difference' and 'my very portion in the world of souls' teach. These commentators also resist reading the Self's 'unmovingness' as denial of all activity: it denies only worldly, samsaric action, for activity is genuinely seen in the Lord, 'austerity is My very heart, learning My body, action My form.' Much of this source is given over to establishing, against any claim of the soul's oneness with the Lord or the supremacy of other deities, that the single great purport of all scripture is the supremacy of the qualities of the Supreme Lord, who alone is unmade by maya and whose power depends on nothing else.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Bhakti

The Gaudiya readers take 'all-pervading' (sarva-gata) NOT as spatial omnipresence but as the soul's going, by the force of its own karma (svakarma), in turn to all kinds of bodies, of gods, men, animals, birds, and the rest. The all-pervasion is a pervasion-by-transmigration, the soul reaching every type of embodiment according to its deeds, not a filling of all space. On 'imperishable,' one commentator warns against gilding the word into 'that whose property is non-destruction,' since the plain word already gives that; the meaning is simply that the soul's non-destructions are eternal. These readers also link the present epithets forward: because the Self is exceedingly subtle it is 'unmanifest,' because it is nonetheless conscious throughout the body it is 'inconceivable,' and because it is free of the six transformations beginning with birth it is 'unchangeable.' (A third Bhakti voice keeps to the shared frame, deriving uncuttability and the rest from partlessness, formlessness, and absence of fluidity, and compressing the verse into a single argument from the incompatibility of these properties with the four assaults.)

Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrīdhara Svāmī

Modern

Ramsukhdas, a non-sectarian devotional Vedanta voice, presses the qualities into a practical and exhaustive form. The Self cannot be cut, burned, wetted, or dried not only by weapons, fire, water, and wind, but by mantras, curses, medicines, and any power at all; he illustrates with cases where a curse cut off a head or burned a man to ashes, and where a raga wetted stone or moonlight wetted a gem, yet none of these touches the dehi, in which the very act cannot enter. He then walks the second-line epithets as an imagined dialogue that closes off every loophole: 'eternal' (it always is), then perhaps it sits in one place ('all-pervading,' it is seated in all beings in one form), then perhaps it comes and goes ('unmoving,' no coming and going), then perhaps it merely trembles in place like a tree ('fixed,' no trembling), then perhaps it was at least once born ('sanatana,' beginningless, from ever). His summing purport: against the world, which is fleeting and unstable even for a moment, these five epithets point to the dehi who abides without interval, one-tasted and of one form, even while one is still identified with body and world.

Swami Ramsukhdas