Every world returns, even the highest heaven; only reaching me ends the turning.

Read through Shankara's spare reasoning and Madhusudana's fuller working-out.

Shankara's surviving fragment states the rule directly: every world up to and including Brahma's returns because it is bounded by time; the fuller reasoning behind that claim is not preserved in what remains of his comment here. Madhusudana carries it further, describing Brahma's world as the enjoyment-ground of those without right vision, and then drawing a real distinction within it: some who reach it through worships whose fruit is gradual liberation gain knowledge there and are released together with Brahma at the dissolution, while others, who arrived by ritual alone, exhaust their merit and are reborn.

Read by locating the cause of return in the perishing of the place itself.

Ramanuja holds that every world up to Brahma's, however genuine a seat of enjoyment and lordship, still perishes, and so its resident perishes along with it; even winning lordship cannot outlast the world's own end. The Lord alone is described as free of any such moment: all-knowing, of unfailing resolve, the very one whose play brings about the world's rise, standing, and dissolution, supremely compassionate, ever of one form. Because there is no occasion of his perishing, reaching him carries no return at all.

Read as a boundary running downward from Brahma's own seat.

Madhva's brief surviving comment reads the phrase as marking a line from Brahma's seat on the great mountain Meru downward, grounding this in a remembered verse that ties birth on earth to that seat and to the human world alike, with freedom from it, in every case, coming only through reaching the one born of Vasudeva. What, if anything, this reading holds about worlds beyond that boundary is not preserved in the fragment available here.

Read as an open dissent from the standard explanation, not a completed alternative doctrine.

Abhinavagupta's extant fragment names the ordinary reading, that even Brahma's reachers return, and states plainly that he finds it troubling, since it would push release to some world higher still than Brahma's own. His own account, gathered from scripture, holds instead that beings wheel and turn ceaselessly through every conditioned state up to Brahma's, from any direction at all. This single dense paragraph is what survives; anything further about what release beyond all worlds would actually mean is not given here and would be a later reader's extension, not his own recorded words.

Read through Sridhara, who names this verse the chapter's own hinge.

Sridhara reads a-brahma as complete, Brahma's own world included, its destructibility guaranteeing that merely ritual attainment there still ends in a fall. Yet he carves out those who reach it by worships whose fruit is gradual liberation and gain knowledge there, releasing them together with Brahma at the great dissolution. He calls the whole prior teaching, on death and the turning of cosmic ages, preparation for landing on exactly this one contrast: 'they return' for everything below, 'it is not' only for those who have come to the Lord.

Read for its structural logic of textual reconciliation, not for new doctrine beyond the source.

Madhusudana's account works like a careful piece of reconciliation between two scriptural claims that might otherwise seem to clash: a rule of universal return from every world, Brahma's included, and a separate promise of non-return from Brahma's world specifically. He shows how a single qualifying word, 'this,' in that promise quietly sorts two outcomes among the very same world's residents, according to whether knowledge, and not merely rite, had already arisen in them.