Every mood you feel has its root in him; none of it holds him.

Read through the image of a rope mistaken for a snake.

The states are read as merely imagined upon the one real ground, exactly as a snake is imagined on a rope glimpsed in poor light. Because the imagined thing has no standing of its own apart from the ground it is superimposed on, its qualities and its faults cannot reach back to stain the ground. What looks like Krishna's involvement in the darker states is, on this reading, only a matter of name and of seeming, never a real modification of what he is. Greed and sorrow, however real they feel to the one who has them, never touch the rope beneath the appearance.

Read through the bond of a body to its indwelling self.

Here the states are not merely imagined; they are real, and really his, standing to him as a body stands to the self that lives within it. A body depends entirely on its self to exist, while the self depends on nothing the body offers back. Krishna's relationship to every state that arises is this same one-directional dependence, except that where an ordinary self at least draws some use from its body, he draws none. His whole purpose in his creation is play, not need.

Read through Madhva's commentary, which treats this verse together with several before it as one continuous passage.

On this reading the states and the beings that carry them are genuinely real and genuinely distinct from Krishna, not imagined away. He is not present in them the way a craftsman's incidental skill marks the cloth he weaves; he works deliberately within the very properties of things. Madhva's own gloss on the verse's closing words is preserved directly: he is not one who stands by leaning on another, for the whole world rests on him, while he himself rests on nothing at all.

Read from a brief surviving fragment; kept close to what it actually says.

The fragment attributed to Abhinavagupta here is compact: sattva and the rest are made of the Blessed One, but he is not made of them, and the one whose own being is made of him comes to know everything by way of him rather than losing himself sorting the world's many separate things. This recognition, the fragment says, belongs only to the rare soul whose inner organ has been favored by a descent of grace after many births have ripened into evenness. A fuller reading in terms of the self recovering its own unbounded nature would reach beyond what this fragment supports, and is offered here only as a clearly marked, conditional extension, not as the master's own further words.

Read as the deliberate close of a chain of self-naming.

Sridhara reads this as the last link in a chain Krishna opened several verses back: I am the taste, the pure scent, the seed, the strength, and now every state as well. The pure, passionate, and dark states all rise by a being's own past action, yet all stand entirely within Krishna's sway, never he within theirs. He calls this the very flavor of Vasudeva, being, awareness, and bliss, filling every state as its ground and remaining unchanged by every one of them.

Read as a general architecture: one ground, many appearances.

Set inside its wider Advaita frame, the verse reads as a single claim about appearance and ground: what shows up as many different moods and conditions draws its entire apparent reality from one unchanging source, and that source is never colored by what appears on it, exactly as a rope remains a rope beneath whatever shape a startled eye mistakes it for.