He stands in front of the whole world, and still only a few see who is standing there.

Read as the binding contrivance of nature's own qualities.

Shankara reads yoga as the joining or contriving of the three qualities of nature, and that very joining is maya, hence yoga-maya, a veil that wholly covers Krishna from everyone outside his devotees. He is careful to add that the wielder of this maya is never clouded by his own maya. Where his surviving text turns to what follows from this, it breaks off into a bare transitional phrase rather than a spelled-out inference, and that gap is left honestly open here rather than filled by invention.

Read as the human form, worn deliberately so all may approach.

Ramanuja reads yoga-maya as the very human shape Krishna shares with embodied selves, the shape that makes people see only a man and nothing more. But he is explicit that this is not an accident of embodiment: Krishna takes on the human form for exactly one reason, so that all might come to take refuge in him. The veil, on this reading, is also the door.

Read as entirely governed by the Lord's own will and power.

Madhva reads the world's not-knowing as ruled, root and branch, by Krishna's own will: yoga is his power as means, and maya a further power beside it, and by these two together, corroborated by the Padma Purana, he both veils himself and binds the world's mind. His surviving comment is brief, and this reading stays close to exactly what that brief comment says, without stretching it into a larger doctrine it does not itself develop.

Read honestly: the extant source is one line, and no more is invented.

What actually survives of Abhinavagupta's comment on this verse is a single terse line, that Krishna does not come within the range of all. It is stated almost as a bare gloss rather than an argument, and it does not develop the kind of reading, yoga-maya as the self's own contracting freedom, that a fuller Kashmir Shaiva treatment might offer. On a Kashmir Shaiva reading, one might extend this by saying the veiling is the Lord's own vimarsha, consciousness concealing its own fullness in order to know itself as finite; but that extension is clearly marked here as a conditional reading beyond the fragment, not Abhinavagupta's own developed word.

Read as a gracious, inconceivable veil, not a deficiency.

Sridhara takes yoga-maya with full seriousness as some unfathomable, wholly inconceivable play of the Lord's own wisdom, the very dexterity of bringing about the impossible. He reads the veil not as a screen ignorance throws up from below, but as a mercy the Lord himself keeps in place, lifted only at his own will, for his own devotees. The hiddenness, on this reading, is tenderness wearing the shape of a limit.

Read as answering the objection that a visibly divine form should be unmistakable.

Madhusudana frames the verse as answering a real objection: given Krishna's manifestly wondrous form and deeds, how could even the undiscerning mistake him for an ordinary man? His answer is that yoga-maya follows Krishna's own resolve, that the non-devotee should not know him in his own form, so that even the fully present cause of knowledge, the very form itself, fails to produce recognition, exactly as ordinary worldly illusion veils something real while showing something that is not.