Grant even the harshest view of the Self, and grief still has nowhere to stand.

Read as a map of rival schools, each disarmed in turn.

Madhusudana refuses to let the concession stay vague. He names the schools that actually hold a non-eternal Self: the materialist, who says the body itself is the Self; the Buddhist of the momentary-consciousness school, for whom the Self is born fresh at every instant; the logician, who holds a Self eternal in substance yet still called born and dying, since for him birth is joining a new body and death is leaving the old. On every one of these, grief fails to find a footing. On the momentary view most sharply of all, since no single witness persists from one instant to the next, there is not even anyone left to see a kinsman die, so not even the plainest, most immediate sorrow can rightly arise.

Read as the Veda-denier's claim that Self and body are one.

Ramanuja fixes the conceded view precisely: it is the position of those who reject scripture's authority and hold that the Self simply is the body, with nothing beyond it. What is granted, then, is only what is obviously true of any body, that it arises and that it perishes, and that this cannot be avoided. He presses one further point. If the body alone is the Self, the fear of what might await the departed in some further world has nothing left to attach to. Death, on this very premise, becomes nearer to relief than to grief.

Read as eternality preserved, never actually surrendered.

Madhva will not let this verse be read as Krishna conceding that the Self itself is non-eternal, since that would set it against the verses just ahead, which speak of the certain birth of the dead and beings unmanifest at their edges. What is granted is narrower: only that birth and death, meaning the Self's connection with a body and its separation from one, occur to a Self that remains, underneath every such joining and parting, entirely changeless. The word for constantly is read as underlining that changelessness, not undermining it.

Read as awareness playing at limitation, not awareness lost.

Abhinavagupta has already described the Self as free, self-luminous awareness, moving from body to body the way a flame passes from wick to wick. Here he grants the furthest possible narrowing of that view: suppose awareness is bound tightly to one body's rise and fall, born when it is born, dying when it dies. Even so, he says, nothing real is lost, because what appears to arise and perish is only awareness playing at a limited form, never awareness itself losing its own light. Grief, on this reading, is mistaking a passing contraction for the whole of what one is.

Read as meeting the grieving heart exactly where it stands.

Sridhara hears in this verse a moment of pastoral accommodation. Krishna does not insist that Arjuna first climb to the highest truth before he can be consoled. He grants, for the moment, that the Self takes birth body after body and dies with each one, bearing the fruit of its deeds the way a mortal frame does. Even so, Sridhara says, there is nothing here to grieve, because the pattern is neither unjust nor an exception; it is simply how the Lord's own ordinance moves through embodied life, and trust in that ordinance, not further argument, is what finally settles a grieving heart.

Read as a comparative proof against every rival theory at once.

Seen with an eye to method rather than doctrine, Madhusudana's catalog of rival non-eternalist positions reads less like a single consoling argument and more like a proof by cases. Whichever theory of a changing self a grieving mind might reach for, materialist, momentary, or logician's compound-eternal, each is shown, on its own terms, to leave behind no persisting witness whose loss could be genuinely mourned. The verse becomes an exhaustive closing of every door grief might try, rather than a single answer offered once.