What you dwell on at the last moment is what you become.

The verse states a law of dying: whatever 'bhava' (state of being, the form or object one is dwelling on, often a particular deity) a person remembers at the very last moment as he gives up the body, that very thing is what he goes to and becomes after death. The commentators stress 'to that and to no other'; the death-time object is decisive and there is no swerving from it. Several read it as the answer to an unspoken worry left by the previous verse: that remembering Krishna at death seems like a private favor to him. This verse universalizes the mechanism. It is not only the one who remembers Krishna who reaches Krishna; whatever being or deity or even any other object one holds in mind at the end, one reaches that. The rule is general, and Krishna's own promise is simply the rule applied to himself.

The second line, 'sada tad-bhava-bhavitah' (always brought into being by that, perfumed by that), explains how the right thought can possibly arise at the chaotic final moment. The death-time recollection is not random and not an arbitrary assignment; it is the ripening of a lifelong habit. 'Bhavana' is glossed as a thorough perfuming or saturating of the mind: whatever the inner organ has been long steeped in is what rises of itself when the body loosens. The impression or 'samskara' laid down by constant contemplation across a whole life is the cause of the last memory. So the last thought is not freely chosen at the end; it is the surfacing of what one has practiced. This is why the verse functions as a warrant for the practical urging that follows: one must steep the mind in the desired object throughout life, not gamble on a single death-bed thought.

Several commentators ground the rule in concrete examples and analogies, showing it as a known law of consciousness rather than a mere assertion. The case of King Bharata, who at death thought of his pet deer and was reborn a deer, is cited repeatedly as proof that the last thought fashions the next form. The worm or caterpillar that constantly dwells on the wasp and is transformed into a wasp (the bhramara-kita analogy) makes the same point: sustained contemplation reshapes the contemplator into the likeness of what is contemplated. Nandikeshvara, who meditated on Mahadeva and attained His very form, is offered as the upward version of the same law. One commentator even compares it to a dream, where whatever idea filled the waking mind reappears, and to a frightened runner who, with no other path, falls into the well ahead of him: at death there is no alternative to the thought already in front of you.

The address 'Kaunteya' (son of Kunti) is read as carrying warmth and reassurance. Because Arjuna is the son of Krishna's father's sister, the address signals an excess of affection and kinship, which in turn signals the certainty of being favored and the impossibility of any deception in this teaching. For Arjuna specifically, the constant dwelling on Krishna is made easy by this very kinship. The same affection underlies what one commentator calls Krishna's extraordinary mercy: by including himself in the common rule, the Lord makes himself attainable at the very same price at which one earns the birth of a dog. The law cuts both ways, and that even-handedness is itself the kindness.

Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Ramsukhdas