No spiritual effort is ever lost: a former life's practice carries the lapsed yogi forward again.

Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as the rise of knowledge over works. The imprint carried forward is specifically the knowledge-impression, and to 'transcend the word-Brahman' means to cross beyond the Veda's action-section and its fruits, becoming fit for knowledge instead of works. One commentator turns the verse to Arjuna himself: see how you, set in battle and not striving for knowledge, were suddenly made to face knowledge on the battlefield by the strength of prior conditioning. The same commentator uses the verse to refute any combination of knowledge and action, for if works and knowledge were to be combined the knower would never transcend the action-section at all, yet the verse says he does. To support the long survival of the dormant imprint, one cites the scriptural illustration of the grass and the leech, which inches forward only after its hold is secured, showing how the imprint endures across long intervals before resuming.

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

Viśiṣṭādvaita

Here shabda-brahman is read as matter itself, prakriti, which is what bears the verbal designations 'god', 'man', 'earth', 'mid-region', 'heaven' and the rest. To 'pass beyond' it is to be freed of connection with matter and to attain the self, which is not fit for such designations and whose single nature is knowledge and bliss. One commentator adds that the seeker, having let his mind wander from the discipline, regains the very wish to know and then carries out the discipline of action and the rest, so that the mechanism by which yoga draws the candidate toward itself is something real and operative, not a mere figure of speech; even partial commitment in inquiry is enough to set it in motion.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators insist that 'going beyond the word-Brahman' means reaching the supreme Brahman itself, not merely being superior to those who perform Vedic rites. One commentator argues at length against the reading 'he is more excellent than the ritualists', holding it unsound because the verse points ahead to the teaching 'thence he goes to the supreme goal'. On this view shabda-brahman names the Vedic injunctions and prohibitions, and transcending them belongs only to one who has actually attained the supreme Brahman. The same commentator defends, on grammatical grounds, that jijnasu carries the sense of a strong wish to know, 'I must come to know yoga', rather than the merely formal sense of inquiry it bears in 'now therefore the inquiry into Brahman'.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators frame the whole verse around the Lord's grace and the path of devotion. The lapsed seeker is turned away from objects and made one settled in yoga as a being-carried, not as his own act: the carrying-along is done by what the Lord has already laid down in him, the conscious portion once set in motion toward Bhagavan borne on by the momentum the Lord placed there. One commentator offers a second reading of shabda-brahma-ativartate: rather than only crossing past the word-Brahman, the seeker by the power of his very inquiry comes to know, in an indirect way, the supreme Brahman that is the real intent hidden within the word-Brahman, and is honoured like a paramahamsa. The other reads the verse as a graduation rather than a punishment: the man who earlier moved only by ordinary trust in the word, and so did not succeed, is now reborn in the highest family, makes the very form of yoga his own, gives up the merely worldly body, and gains a supra-mundane body. The arc, he says, is not of one who failed and pays for failure, but of one who has only changed schools at the Lord's hand and now graduates.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These commentators read shabda-brahman as the Veda, specifically the path of action it teaches, and 'transcending' it as leaving that ritual path to stand on the path of yoga alone; one says plainly that the Vedic word, the Veda that describes action joined with desire, 'does not strike him down'. The drawing-forward turns the man back from sense-objects and makes him brahma-nishtha, fixed on Brahman. One commentator develops the inner experience vividly: the man restarts from the very point his good intellect had reached when his former life was cut short, gains unlimited new vision, grasps without great effort truths that normally need a teacher, and his senses come under his mind, his mind joins the life-wind, and that life-wind unites with the Supreme Spirit; such a person, though appearing only a seeker, is in fact felt to be already perfect from his very origin.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators read the verse as practical encouragement. One spells out the mechanism step by step: if no great evil action was done, the yogic samskaras carry the practice on vigorously in the new birth; if evil was done, the yogic tendencies are suppressed only until that fruit is exhausted, then resume, and the man attains the final beatitude. He also reads the seeker who transcends shabda-brahman as one who rises above mere ritualism, no longer satisfied with forms and ceremonies but thirsting for a higher satisfaction. The plain takeaway, he says, is that no effort in yoga is ever wasted, so even the dullest aspirant has no cause for disappointment. Another takes shabda-brahman concretely as the desire-prompted ritual, the yajnas and yagas prescribed by the Veda, which even the mere seeker passes beyond. A third grounds the verse socially: the soul reborn into a family of yogis inherits the ease of practice, the spiritual atmosphere, the good company and the teaching that those born into wealthy homes do not get, and is drawn forcibly toward the supreme Self by the good samskaras settled in his inner being from the human birth in which he had renounced worldly pleasures.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas