Unseen before birth, unseen after death: the brief visible life leaves nothing to grieve over.

Advaita Vedānta

These commentators press the verse all the way to unreality. If a being is not there at the beginning and not there at the end, then by the rule that what is absent before and after is absent in the middle too, it is not truly there even in its visible middle. The manifest creature is then like shell-silver mistaken for real silver, like a rope seen as a snake, like a mirage-pool, like people met in a dream: an appearance hung between the unseen and the unseen, with no standing of its own. The ignorance that makes a rope look like a snake is itself not present as either rope or snake, so the whole arising and ceasing is unmanifest at root. On this view no truth-knower grieves the loss of a mirage; one who wakes does not weep for dream-kin. Two of these voices add an alternative cosmic reading of the same words, taking the beings as the great elements, space and the rest: their unmanifest origin is consciousness conditioned by ignorance, their manifest middle is name-and-form produced by that same ignorance, and their end is dissolution back into their cause, as a pot dissolves into clay. Even when scripture calls the Self the seat of this arising and ceasing, that is said only figuratively, because the unchanging Self cannot really be a locus of effects the way clay is.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read the verse as fully consistent with the reality of beings. Beings such as men are existent substances. What changes across the three stages is not their being but only whether a given state is apprehended: the prior state is unapprehended, the middle state, manhood and the rest, is apprehended, and the later state is unapprehended again. Throughout, things abide in their own natures, so there is no occasion to lament. One of these commentators sharpens the point: what counts as a thing's real nature is just its capacity for transformation, not any one of its phases. The human shape is not a body's true nature, since it is only a particular putting-together of parts; the unmanifest state is not its true nature either, since that too is just a particular coming-apart. So the loss of the manifest shape is no more grievable than the earlier passage into it. The same commentator presses Arjuna on practical grounds: if you grieve at separation from a thing because it pleases you, then your true grief-causes are the enemies and hardships, not the loss of joys like victory; if you fear your body's destruction, then a warrior should guard it by his strength; and if you fear the blame that follows killing kin, know that failing to protect your kin out of timidity draws a far heavier disgrace, an infamy worse than death. This grief is not like the unavoidable pain of cold and heat; it springs from an unconsidered, attractive picture of the self, and so it can be removed by removing that picture.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Bhedabheda

This commentator dwells on the inevitability built into the cycle rather than on the status of the manifest world. When the action that triggered a birth is exhausted, death is certain and bound to come. And for one who has died, taking up a body again is unavoidable, because other causes that bring about a further body are already present. So there is body again, and action again, in unbroken succession. The verse's three stages are read as one turn of an inescapable causal chain, and grief over a single death misses that the chain itself never stops.

Śrī Bhāskara

Dvaita

These commentators treat the verse with deliberate restraint. One simply notes that Krishna is making the very point at hand, that beings are unmanifest in their beginnings. The other adds a guarding caution: the consolation here is not arrived at by settling the metaphysical nature of birth and death. In other words, this verse offers a practical ground for not grieving, the plain fact of the unseen-to-seen-to-unseen passage, and should not be stretched into a theory that birth and death are unreal.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read both the manifest and the unmanifest as the Lord himself. The visible world is the Lord's manifest portion; the unmanifest before and after is also the Lord; the whole bracketing of seen between unseen is simply the Lord's own cosmic mode of showing and withdrawing. One of them puts the unmanifest origin and rest as the imperishable, the Lord, into which beings arise and finally settle. The comfort then is not that beings are nothing, but that origin, middle, and end all take place within one imperishable source. He extends this even to Arjuna himself: your own destruction after slaying others is no dreadful prospect, for your dissolution too will take place in the very source you came from.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator ties the verse back to holding eternity and non-eternity together. The phrasing about the born is needed, he notes, or the two could not be reconciled. Destruction follows birth and birth follows destruction, so the round of birth and death turns like a wheel. Since it is an endless revolving, no single portion of it is the proper object of grief.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators agree the verse removes the ground of grief, but they split on whether beings are real. Some take avyakta as primal matter, the prior causal form from which bodies arise and into which they dissolve, much as a pot comes from and returns to clay; reflecting on this nature of body and the rest, lament is groundless, like sorrow over things seen in a dream once one has awakened. One develops a strongly realist line: even before birth the subtle and gross bodies were indistinctly present in their causal elements, and even in the great cosmic dissolution beings persist in subtle form because their karma persists, so they are unmanifest at the edges and manifest in the middle without ever being unreal. Another presses this further and explicitly rejects the illusion reading: in an existent substance like clay, a jar is said to be produced when the clay takes the jar-shaped state and destroyed when it takes the broken state, while the clay itself abides at all times; just so, bodies lack name and form at their beginning and end and so are called unmanifest, but the elements that compose them exist at every time, so there is no occasion to grieve over what really exists. He calls the view that the world is mere dream-illusion feeble, since it would wrongly deny that an effect pre-exists in its cause. A more devotional voice keeps the dream image but turns it toward refuge: this world appears in changing forms through delusion, as the sky is screened by clouds, so fix your gaze instead on the imperishable Brahman on which the devotees concentrate to be freed.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators carry the verse to a present-day reader and divide along the same fault line. One reads it through the Samkhya doctrine that the whole perceptible universe came by degrees out of one original imperceptible substance and dissolves back into it at the final dissolution; since anything's perceptible form is bound by nature to be destroyed, lament is futile, and he notes the same futility follows on the Vedanta view too, so grief over death can only come from not knowing the Self. Another takes the strong illusion line: as there is no pot at the beginning or end, you should feel the pot to be unreal even in the middle, and so too the body, and one who grasps this and all the relationships built on it, as son, friend, father, will not grieve. A third draws a careful distinction the others do not stress: the bodies of beings were absent before and will be absent after, and so in truth are slipping into absence every moment even now; but the sharirin, the embodied Self that wears them, was present before and will be present after, so it is surely present in the middle too. His conclusion is a clean pair: the bodies are ever-absent, the Self is never-absent, so over neither can grief properly arise.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas