Bhedābheda, through the Gītā

Stays with the plain words: Kurukshetra is named the field of dharma simply because it gives rise to righteousness.

Etymology only, no larger system built on the line.

The verse is plain military fact: a vast many-limbed army marshalled into a deliberate array by Drupada's skilled, intelligent son.

Stays with the military sense and declines the psychological intrigue.

The men are exalted, even divine, for power, mastery, and past victories; the rank measures the chariot's own excellence.

Bhaskara, who ties "maharatha" to the chariot itself rather than to numbers of archers fought.

A plainly confident reading: the enemy just named is feeble before Drona, and 'distinguished' means foremost by lineage and valor.

No hidden fear; the turn simply asserts superiority.

The named champions are only the leading edge; many other heroes stand ready, so the boast runs past this line.

Takes the verse as opening into a longer claim.

The Bhima-led Pandava force is insufficient and the Bhishma-led Kaurava force is sufficient to destroy them.

The larger, better-led army is the adequate one.

The joy may be produced in the whole assembled army or in Duryodhana in particular; the text leaves it open.

Declines to fix the recipient of the joy.

The verse's plain sense stands; one should not object to the Gita's diction by appeal to grammar, since the epic is equal to scripture.

A note on the text's authority, not a different account of the event.

Krishna placed the chariot intending, should Arjuna falter, to set him moving again by the instruction of knowledge.

A forward-looking, pedagogical reading; 'tas' glossed as 'facing them'.

His pity is sincere and his giving up the fight is a real abandonment, with no verdict that it is delusion.

Arjuna sees signs of victory reversed into ill omens, or plainly inauspicious signs, and foresees no benefit from killing his kinsmen.

Reading the omen-clause.

He ignores the omens; the good is emptied out because the very people victory was for now stand to die.

Unfolds the refusal as a chain of renounced motives, purpose-first rather than omen-first.

The same person who would kill is the one in whom joy must arise, and no joy can be born from a kinsman's death.

On the agent of joy.

Arjuna's refusal is honest moral sight, not confusion: he plainly sees the wrong and so turns back.

It dwells on the concrete: family-ruin is near and certain, and the friends are Drona and the rest, so the betrayal of trusted elders carries the guilt.

Reads mitra-droha two ways: the sin in the intent to slay, and the stain on the one who betrays.

Being killed unarmed and indifferent would be the greater peace for Arjuna; this is stated as his own preference, not a general rule.

Read plainly, not as a doctrine of ahimsa.

The two epithets are the devotee voicing, in due order, his repeated reliance on the Lord.

'I do not see' means 'I do not discern with my mind' any cause to remove the grief, so Arjuna asks Krishna expecting him to be the one who removes it.

Reads the seeing as a precise act of the intellect.

The warriors do their duty and attain the same indestructibility, so they are not fit objects of grief.

Comments on the cluster's consolation rather than parsing the plural pronouns.

The embodied selves are eternal portions of the Supreme Self, in both difference and non-difference like spark and fire.

Non-difference is natural; difference is due to limiting conditions; the souls have no origination or dissolution.

From sense-contact arise the pleasures and pains of cold and heat; the self, recognized as the same through every age, is eternal.

Bhaskara; a brief surface gloss, not built into a developed system here.

The sense-contacts are impermanent, shown by their coming and going, so their cessation can be brought about by a means: endurance preceded by knowledge.

Cold and heat are named only as illustrations of the threefold suffering and its corresponding pleasures.

Pleasure and pain inhere in the self the way colors inhere in a gem, without altering it; the self itself undergoes no crushing or destruction.

Grounded in the experience of self-recognition, 'I am the same' across time.

The self is indestructible because it is partless, so not even the Lord can destroy it; the verse simply sets out the self's nature to remove the fear of destruction.

Worship of Brahman is taught later, in chapter six.

Like space, the Self cannot be slain because it has no parts to separate; destruction belongs only to what has parts.

Because eternal it is all-pervading, because pervading stable, because stable unmoving; the qualities follow in a chain.

From a partial surviving text.

The concession is that the Self arises and perishes along with its limiting conditions, the body and senses.

Framed in terms of upadhis, the Self's adjuncts.

When the action causing a birth is spent, death is certain, and a further body is certain too; the three stages are one turn of an inescapable causal chain.

Dwells on the cycle's inevitability rather than the status of the world.

The Self is apprehended only with the body present, and that entanglement breeds rival delusions, so even when heard of none truly knows it.

Against rival errors about consciousness.

The warrior is only an illustration; for everyone, doing one's own proper duty conduces to the highest good.

Reads the verse as where the Gita joins knowledge and action toward the highest good.

The righteous war is an effortless open gateway to heaven, and to walk away from it is the mark of the ill-fated.

For a man esteemed for valor, disgrace is heavier than death, so death in battle is preferable.

For one honored for qualities like valor, read with the surrounding argument.

The sting is the fall in standing: a man esteemed as righteous and valiant being made light of, and that downfall in reputation is itself called more grievous still.

Measures the contrast against the high regard Arjuna currently enjoys.

Samkhya here means discrimination of the self's true nature, and yoga the performance of action with equanimity and offering to the Lord.

A brief framing note, not a comment on the no-loss promise itself.

Action joined with understanding is the means of crossing beyond worldly suffering; he does not develop the one-versus-many contrast.

Gloss stays with action united with understanding.

The verse addresses those given to action alone, who absolutize ritual while severed from the knowledge that should accompany it.

Final release comes by knowledge and action combined, as heaven comes from joined fire-sacrifices.

The Vedas set worldly existence in motion through the gunas; freedom is rising beyond all three.

Glosses the neighboring verses, not the well-image.

Action done as worship of the Lord has no disparity, since He alone is the agent; this equanimity is yoga.

Action joined to understanding is itself yoga, and is far superior to action driven by its fruit, which only binds the doer.

The verse is a turning point directing Arjuna toward the Supreme Self and the affliction-free station the steady understanding points toward.

Forward-looking, goal-focused frame.

These marks are themselves means to be practiced, since a quality never practiced never comes into being at all.

The simile is taken in its plain sense with no added metaphysical machinery: desires enter, the sage stays unmoved, and he attains peace.

Plain reading only.

Plainly: this is the state of Brahman, and abiding in it even at death one reaches the extinction that is Brahman.

Takes 'antakāla' as the hour of death; offers no further system.

The verse endorses combining the two, for action done in worship of the Lord is itself the means by which knowledge dawns in the purified intellect.

Bhaskara.

Freedom from action means liberation itself, and it comes from knowledge that depends on action, not from knowledge or renunciation alone.

Naishkarmya read as release, free of both merit and demerit.

Passing lightly over the censure, the true ideal is the man who restrains the senses with the mind and engages the organs of action unattached, established by acting as enjoined.

Reads the verse mainly as a foil for the next.

He is simply free from attachment to results, and the teaching presses straight on to the call to act.

A bare gloss; no further system is offered here.

Yajna is the enduring righteousness (apurva) whose presiding deity is Vishnu; action done solely to accomplish righteousness, free of clinging to results, is to be held to firmly for liberation.

Scripture alone is the authority for what counts as righteousness.

Sacrifice yields wishes not by magic but through reciprocity: you nourish the gods, the gods nourish you, and all attain the highest good.

Reads it plainly, anticipating the next verse's give-and-take.

Nourish the gods with their portion and they nourish you with rain and abundance; the fruit splits by desire, and one who enjoys their gifts while offering nothing back is simply a thief.

On the debt that follows.

What is set apart for sacrifice is by nature meant to be eaten, so the remnant frees you while cooking for yourself eats only guilt.

Reads briefly, then turns to the structural point that action must be performed to keep the world's wheel turning.

The chain is literal, and what the sacrifice manifests is dharma; but action rises from the Veda and the Veda from the Imperishable, so the food-chain is the lower end of a ladder reaching Brahman.

On where the chain finally leads.

Brahman is the Veda that reveals action, and the Imperishable is a name of the supreme Self, so the all-pervading Brahman is itself called the Imperishable.

The source entry breaks off before completing the reading.

By not performing the occasion, its result is destroyed; yet giving up action is approved for the one who has become Brahman, who delights in the Self alone.

The exception is the one who has become Brahman.

In this state alone there is no ground for entitlement to action, and so action is simply abandoned.

This state of fullness in the Self alone.

One still ruled by body and senses cannot claim this exemption, and counsel to abandon action in that state springs from sloth.

Sharp practical guard against premature claims of the exemption.

Walk the path royal sages like Janaka walked; they reached perfection by action alone, so you too should act without hesitation.

The supreme attained by unattached action is the Supreme Self.

The word 'alone' is mere emphasis: it excludes the absence of action, not knowledge, and Janaka and the rest were freed by action.

A further note that in the highest sense action is done for one's own sake is left incomplete in the source.

Were the model to go still, the very way that would spread is the way of non-action itself.

The danger named is precisely the propagation of inactivity, not vague imitation.

Even the Lord in a human body is bound to righteous duty, so renunciation of action does not hold for the embodied; while the cognition of difference persists there is entitlement to act, and the wise should act without attachment.

Draws the verse into a general rule about who is entitled to action.

The man of knowledge acts with great zeal precisely for release from the binding consequences of both good and bad deeds, to be freed from the whole tangle of merit and demerit.

In its own nature the Self has no agency and abides as bliss; what agency it shows is borrowed from proximity, as a lodestone moves iron.

On the Self's essence versus its contact with the body.

The man of imperfect knowledge is the sacrificer who knows action alone; the man of perfect knowledge practices knowledge and action together, and should not disturb the action-only sacrificers.

Reads the verse through the combined path of knowledge and action (jnana-karma-samuccaya).

All activity belongs to Brahman by Brahman's own sentience; since effect and cause are not different, the action attains identity with Brahman and is thought 'not mine, it is done in Me.'

This freedom of the faithful is best seen against its opposite: the downfall of the one who finds fault.

Read only by pairing at once with the next verse, where those confounded by other systems are known as ruined.

Nature is action done in another birth, abiding as latent impressions like dye in a garment; it sorts hearers, and those whom past merit moves to follow are pointed onward to the real practice in the next verse.

On why hearers respond differently.

Your own duty carries the very advantage of being yours; even roughly done it is more praiseworthy, and true prosperity comes from your own work, not from resorting to another's.

A declaratory passage of praise in the varna sense; reads 'even' as a careful concession.

Desire sits hidden and settled within the embodied being and its senses, seated as if at ease, and deludes them from within.

This source largely restates the verse rather than expounding it.

Desire is an insatiable fire that envelops knowledge as smoke covers fire, wrapping and hiding wisdom.

Krishna the imperishable one declared the yoga to the sun, and it is eternal simply because the eternal Veda enjoins it.

The many births are real manifestations that rest in him, the one Lord; without a Lord to receive them, there would be no one to whom one renounces actions.

On why a distinct Lord must exist at all.

He comes into being age after age to protect the good, destroy evildoers, and firmly establish righteousness.

Read with the sequel verse, framing the descent by its stated purpose.

He protects those devoted to their own duty, destroys the evildoers, and thereby firmly establishes righteousness, age after age.

Stays close to the three purposes without further elaboration here.

Read plainly: his birth is the actual descent in places like Mathura, and his action is the protecting of the good, with no system built around the line.

Anchored in the concrete historical appearances and deeds.

Made of Me and refuged in Me together mean the devotee has truly no other refuge at all, not the interested reliance of a subject on a king.

Reads knowledge-and-austerity as one fused unit, jnana-tapas.

Freedom from craving itself, not having every desire fulfilled, is the real cause of non-staining.

So anyone who acts free of craving and offers action to the Lord is likewise unbound.

The qualified seeker must grasp all three, including concrete wrong cases, and even enjoined action done for its fruit is not to be done.

Concrete content given to the wrong categories.

The verse states a plain fact, not praise: those who act free of craving, their deeds burnt by Brahman-knowledge, simply are the wise.

Praise functions only when attached to a command; here there is none, so the line must be read as describing the matter as it is.

He turns the mind from impermanent fruits and rests content in the eternal Self. Freedom comes through doing one's obligatory duty as worship of Brahman, with the mind established in non-duality and everything offered to Him.

Through obligatory duty performed as worship in a non-dual frame.

It means scriptural action done by body and senses without longing for fruit; while acting this way no sin comes, while omitting it sin would.

Restricted to Vedic action, not the forbidden.

Action is not annulled but absorbed, for action itself is Brahman and arises from Brahman; the deed and its fruit dissolve by attaining the very form of Brahman.

On reading the dissolving as absorption, not cancellation.

What is offered is the inner organ of cognition drawn near to the supreme Self, accomplished in the mind as a uniting of Brahman and the self.

Specifies which 'self' is offered; knowledge can arise even in a god's state.

The first sacrifice belongs to lifelong celibate students; the second to householders given lawful enjoyment by scripture.

Maps the two offerings onto two sanctioned stations of life.

Air is drawn up the central channel through the head, raising the mind toward the sun; this is the path of Brahman, a resort at the hour of death.

Gives the practice an explicit inner anatomy and a journey out of the body.

The remnant is plainly the leftover of the sacrificial substance, eaten as nectar; even action done with desire becomes a cause of Brahman, directly or in succession, for all sacrifices rest in the mouth of Brahman.

Heaven won by rite is a graded abiding, not release; only the knowledge-sacrifice is competent for final freedom, and action's fruit stays unexhausted when joined to it.

Against liberation by action alone.

It is plainly the rule for gaining knowledge of the Self, and the teacher must be one who has directly realized that reality, not only one who possesses learning.

Knowledge of the Self.

As all waters enter the ocean and become one, so this whole manifold world enters and rests in the Self, its single cause; difference and non-difference are held together in that bond of cause and effect.

Difference-and-non-difference held in the cause-effect relation, not resolved either way.

The word for knowledge here denotes the Self; the one perfected in action finds it in his own understanding, with time itself being the cause of ripening.

Reads the verse as a grammatical hinge into the next verse on faith and restraint.

The faithless one denies the Self, and the doubter hangs suspended on the question whether there is liberation or not, and through that very ignorance he perishes.

A terse reading that does not develop the threefold loss.

By offering work to Brahman, action is laid down in the supreme Self and made one with it; then, doubt cut, you should take to yoga and rise.

On renunciation as offering action into Brahman.

Both renunciation and the yoga of action lead to the highest good, and of the two the yoga of action is the superior one.

Both the renunciation of all actions in the Lord and the yoga of action lead to the supreme good, yet action is superior because renunciation has duality for its sphere.

The very Brahman the Sankhyas behold is reached, that is, contemplated, by the followers of yoga.

The Sankhya and yoga united here are the two disciplines of the Gita, not the philosophical systems of Kapila and the Naiyayikas.

By the nominative case the word names the renouncer, not renunciation; established in the vision of non-difference as he offers the fruit, the renouncer reaches Brahman before long.

Reading 'sannyasa' grammatically as the renouncer, not the thing renounced.

He thinks he does nothing because the workings of the senses and breaths are Brahman's own operations, not the private acts of a separate doer.

Purity here means aloneness, which is liberation itself; one purified with respect to body and the rest is said to be free.

Lifts the goal toward final release.

One first acts, then on gaining the light becomes the supreme Self and abides freed, the begun actions exhausted only by being lived out.

Renouncing in Brahman, beholding Brahman as agent, fruit, and goal alike.

The verse describes the liberated one, who ordains no duties and grants no fruit because the relation of dependent and master has ceased and his desires are fulfilled.

He is spoken of 'as if' an ordinary creature only because ordinary beings have dependents to govern.

A plain term-by-term reading: understanding, self, steadfast intent, and goal are all set in that Brahman.

Entry breaks off mid-sentence; no fuller distinctive reading preserved.

They become seers of the one Brahman that pervades all these beings as space pervades all things, the same throughout however different the vessels.

Each member of the list marks a station: the cow worthy of honor, the elephant the middle, the dog and dog-eater the most contemptible.

Everything held by the intellect becomes Brahman alone, as a thing fallen in a salt field becomes salt; so resting in evenness, rebirth is conquered.

He should not rejoice exceedingly, nor let his mind fall into agitation over the undesired.

Reads the prohibition lightly as 'not excessively,' pointing to the joy found within the Self.

The self's joy alone deserves to be called imperishable, established by the perishability of its rival, which the next verse declares.

Grounded in scripture, that enjoyments born of contact have a beginning and an end.

The enjoyments rooted in sense-object contact are causes of pain, occasional and momentary, so one who sees this fault takes no delight in them.

A straightforward reading linking forward to the steady yogin.

The three inwardnesses rest in the inner Self, whose light is unlike sun or wind; the attainment is the supreme yoga, joined to Brahman.

Inner light against outer lights.

It means near at hand in the immediate present; once it is settled for the living, the dead are covered already, so 'for the dead' need not be said.

Reads 'abhitah' as immediacy of time, and explicitly rejects the 'on both sides' reading as unnecessary by the maxim of the stick and the cake.

When the mind refuses to carry the objects inward to the Self, they simply remain outside; the whole weight falls on that refusal.

He is the very fruit of sacrifice and the enjoyer of that fruit, gratified as a deity is gratified by an offering, though for one whose desires are fulfilled there is no ordinary enjoyment.

The fruit-free doer of obligatory action is the renouncer and yogi, while the deliberate abandoner of action has no link to knowledge and his non-doing even calls for expiation.

Turns sharply against the Samkhya's celebrated abandoner of action.

Renunciation means by its very root the complete depositing and offering of one's actions unto the Supreme Self, not a fixed name for a stage of life.

Reads sannyāsa etymologically, reaching wherever actions are wholly offered up.

An alternative wording reads the line as 'in supreme selves the mind is equal,' supplying the missing construction.

Attributed to Bhaskara but reaching us only secondhand through Jayatirtha's report and dispute.

Taking the root in its sense of attaining, the yogi has attained Brahman, and the bliss he draws near to is the bliss of the Self, beyond the senses.

Settles the grammar of brahma-bhuta as attainment rather than bare transformation.

Once he drops the ego-bound, ignorance-conditioned form, he sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Supreme Self, which declares their non-difference.

The equal vision is the vision of Brahman as the one reality beneath apparent egoic separateness.

The mutual non-vanishing holds plainly, and the close is distinctive: the seer comes to be of the very nature of the Lord's own being, holding identity and his own standing together.

Identity and the seer's standing held together, not collapsed.

Seen as having Brahman for its self, all that appears is Brahman alone, as foam and waves are held within the water; so the yogi abides in God.

On abiding through the water-and-wave image.

The likeness is plain: as my pleasure is dear to me, so theirs is dear to them, and as my pain is unwelcome, so is theirs. This sits within the vision of non-duality everywhere, though such knowing is very hard to win.

The yoga the Lord declared has no steady foundation Arjuna can see, because the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding.

Reads the verse straight, with the following verse cited as its warrant.

The mind enters the Supreme Self again and again until it stands steady on that firm ground.

One first learns from scripture that all is Brahman, then meditates on the Self in the heart's lotus.

He is one devoid of effort: faithful, yet his mind has slipped from the nearness of yoga and not turned back, so the question is simply where he finally goes.

Reading the case as one who does not strive.

This is the fruit of action done for the Lord's sake, which is never barren and issues either in blessed worlds or in final release.

Holds this answer for followers of the path of action, not for those who abandon action seeking liberation from knowledge alone.

The latent impression gathered in a former birth carries the yogi onward; striving, his sins purified, perfected through many births, he reaches the supreme goal.

The verse dwells less on ranking and more on the yogi's gradual perfecting across many births until he reaches the supreme goal.

The striving yogi, his sins purified by surpassing effort, is not released in a single birth alone.

This yogin stands above the men of penance and ritual, and since the teaching is given to Arjuna the householder, the charge is simply: become a yogi.

Refutes that the chapter teaches yoga to renouncers alone.

The heart, made tender by natural affection, takes refuge with no other shelter, and so knows Him free of doubt and entire, just as He is.

This reader construes both qualifiers as describing the Lord: Me, who am doubt-free and entire.

The teaching unveils the Lord's essential nature together with the direct realization, recognized as I am that, after which nothing further remains.

Identity recognized within the disclosure of his nature.

Read plainly: of the perfected, a rare one knows Krishna as he really is, and he now begins to tell of himself.

This leads straight into the next verse's account of his eightfold nature.

The five originate the gross body, mind and intellect mean the inner organ, and ego is taking self for non-self and non-self for self, the very ignorance that drives rebirth.

The moral weight of the ego.

The eightfold divided nature is the lower, the enjoyable object; this gloss affirms that and does not develop the higher nature here.

Comments only on the lower term.

Both natures are genuinely real and genuinely born from the Lord: matter transforms, the conscious soul persists as the enjoyer of its own fruits.

Grounds the conscious cause in scripture, not inference.

He produces the world by the real transformation of His own power, yet His essential nature suffers no destruction.

As the spider sends out and draws back its thread from itself, He brings forth the world from Himself.

Here he names the world-sustaining essences, the very things that are the causes of the world's continuance.

Distinct from the later section, where excellences are praised whether or not they sustain the world.

The Lord is the strength of the strong, free from desire and passion, not the strength that arises from those.

A brief gloss in line with the common reading; adds no further system.

The three kinds of states are whole classes of beings, the gods, demons and humans, serpents and the like, all proceeding from him; their activity depends on him and he depends on no creature.

The guna-states delude the world from knowing the Lord beyond them, and at once the rescue follows: no one crosses this wilderness alone, only those who take refuge in him cross.

Holds the veil and the only escape together as one teaching.

Only a fragment survives: it reads 'divine' as belonging to the deity and the maya as fashioned by the Lord himself.

Only a broken fragment of the commentary survives.

Their knowledge carried off by maya, such people have resorted to the demonic disposition marked by deceit and falsehood; the comment turns at once to ask who, by contrast, does take refuge.

Brief gloss, pointing ahead.

Four kinds of qualified candidates worship the Lord, and the knower is specifically the one who knows Brahman.

A terse gloss of each of the four.

The Lord is the inner Self of all, and the knower, realizing this very one is also his own Self, is bound by natural affection while attraction and aversion never literally touch the Lord.

Holds identity and distinction together; the knower is dear by truly knowing scripture and attaining oneness.

The Lord plainly holds the knower to be His very Self, affirmed directly, because the knower is established in Him alone as the unsurpassed goal.

He who dwells in all and in whom all dwells is seen as both the cause and the manifested world at once.

This all-as-Vasudeva sight is higher than the devotion of those who still see duality.

In the deity's very image the Lord makes your faith unshakable, fitting himself to your action, for your action produces the fruit while he abides as the one who ordains it.

The form is the deity's image; stress on the Lord conforming to the worshipper's action.

Scripture names the Lord master of all beings, who bestows fruit everywhere according to deeds done in secret and openly; even worship of other gods bears fruit, but that fruit is finite.

Grounds the point in the Upanishadic declaration of the Lord as protector and bridge of the worlds.

The worshippers of the gods reach the gods, while Krishna's devotees reach the everlasting state.

The barest gloss, affirming the finite-versus-everlasting contrast without elaboration.

They take him for one deity like Mahadeva, not knowing he is the root cause and overlord even of Brahma and Indra.

On his rank among gods.

Yoga-maya is the union of his own lordly powers, by which he conceals himself; he knows all beings, yet no one knows him.

The Lord knows beings of all three times, but the deluded world does not know him; the true knower realizes that Vasudeva is all.

What deludes the world is the pull of the pairs of opposites, born of desire and aversion, gripping beings from birth.

Toward what benefits comes pleasure and engagement, toward what harms comes pain and withdrawal, so the word 'pairs' carries real meaning beyond mere desire and aversion.

On why the word 'pairs' is not idle.

The verse is treated mainly as the trigger for the questions about Brahman, the Self, action, the elemental, and the divine that open the next chapter, without a developed gloss of its own.

A bare lemma before turning to chapter eight.

Adhyatma is the jiva, a portion belonging to the imperishable Lord; karma is chiefly the Lord's creative sending-forth of Hiranyagarbha and beings.

Gives the Lord's emission as primary, the sacrificer's offering as a reported secondary view.

The standard identifications hold, and the offering is the mental act of relinquishment, this is not mine but the deity's; sacrifice in general, not one particular rite, is the fitting topic here.

Glossing the offering and rejecting the narrow Vaisvanara-rite reading of body.

Whoever departs remembering the Lord goes to His state, one instance of the wider law that you become what you dwell on at the end.

Remember the Lord always and do your own duty; you need not fear that the last thought will fail, for the omniscient Lord Himself controls the workings of the mind.

In truth he has no form, for scripture denies it; he is partless and so subtler than space, made of light and bliss, yet sets forth a form to favor those who worship him.

On 'subtler than the atom' and unthinkable form.

To enter is plainly to attain, and the continence named here belongs to householders too, not only to monks.

Continence means refraining from forbidden or non-obligatory union, observed everywhere.

The mind is confined in the Supreme Lord who dwells in the lotus of the heart, the breath rising by the channel of Brahman.

Only the opening glosses are given; the commentary breaks off into the next verse-unit.

There is no liberation deferred to another time here; the topic is the higher knowledge, and at the last moment one comes to the Lord alone, the all-pervading Supreme Self.

Rejects the gradual-liberation reading; the chapter's pledge was the Imperishable.

A knower who holds a cosmic office continues there as the duty of the post, not a failure of knowledge; when the begun deeds are exhausted, release follows.

Why a knower seems not to return.

The unmanifest covers the subtle elements, the souls with their deeds and nescience, and the inner Lord; this verse describes the lesser dissolution where only beings dissolve, not the great elements.

Naming both levels guards that no deed done is lost and no fruit arises unearned.

Dormant past deeds bring back beings of the same names and forms, as the same rice is eaten again though not the same grains.

Sameness is of name and form, not numerical identity.

It is the conscious Supreme Self set over against the unconscious unmanifest named before; that it does not perish when all perish is the mark by which the Lord is known.

The imperishable is the Supreme Self from whom the whole universe arises, and that supreme abode is reached by devotion that turns to no other.

Grounding the goal in the scripture that all things proceed from the Imperishable.

The undivided devotion is worship of Him alone through praise, salutation, meditation, and concentration, with no other deity beside Him.

Devotion as concrete worship.

Time names the path: the path of the gods belongs to the follower of action, the path of the fathers to the follower of knowledge.

'Brahman' here means the Supreme Self, not the lower creator's world; this is the independent course of non-return, not a mere arrival at Hiranyagarbha's realm.

Rejects the reading that the path reaches only Brahma's world.

Knowing the two paths, the wise person strives not for works alone but for the union of knowledge and works, since that combination serves the highest good.

On where the summary points.

The verse praises the chapter's knowledge by setting it above the lower alternatives, so the faithful become devoted to it.

Read briefly, as praise by way of disparaging the rest.

Reading the works concretely, the yogi crosses all their merit and reaches the first station, which belongs to the Supreme Lord.

No one is freed here in this body; release comes by the path of light, once the subtle body falls away.

On the question of when release arrives.

He pervades all by his subtle, sense-transcending Self, yet stands in none of it, because he stands in his own greatness.

Beings of slight measure move about within the pervasive Lord, held by him as their support rather than joined to him by contact.

For the state of subsistence between origin and dissolution.

He really sends beings forth through a nature that really transforms, and it transforms along the lines of their past deeds.

Unattached in his works he is unbound, and nature gives birth to the world only under his overseeing, never on her own.

Read against the claim that material nature creates on its own.

They take him for a mere warrior named Vasudeva; that misreading marks them as empty of hope, deed, and knowledge.

Read with the verse that follows, as a portrait of the scoffers themselves.

The knowledge is futile because it is aimed at what is not the Self, and the deeds and hopes built upon it fall with it.

Read against the great souls of the verse that follows.

Here Krishna describes the worshippers of devoted action; those of fully matured knowledge follow as a distinct class in the next verse.

For worshippers whose way is devoted action.

The gross that serves our dealings and the subtle that escapes them are both the Lord; nothing whatever stands apart from him.

For the desireless worshipper, in whatever form the worship takes.

Those with no other object of worship are ever steadfast, and the Lord himself bears their gaining and their keeping.

Read as the plain words, without further system.

Such worshippers honor real gods and still worship the Lord alone; their flaw is double, missing both the path of liberation and the manner the manuals prescribe.

Read with the next line, where not knowing him in truth explains the fall.

He abides as Indra and the rest, enjoying and ruling every rite, and each worshipper goes exactly where his vow was pointed.

Read alongside the verse that follows.

As one worships in this life, so one becomes hereafter, and His worshippers grow into the very nature of Vasudeva.

You offer your actions into Brahman while contemplating that doer, deed, and fruit are not truly different.

Read as naming the contemplation that the offering itself carries.

Grace follows the deeds of beings as fire warms whoever duly draws near; neither attachment nor aversion moves him.

Read by the structure of deeds rather than by preference.

Yes; whatever the conduct, the firm settling of the mind on the right course is itself the reason he counts as righteous.

Each attains by doing the work natural to him as the Lord's own command, and the goal so reached is heaven.

On the reading that one's own duty is itself the enjoined worship.

The sweeping welcome is praise meant to spur the heart; the real command enjoins devotion and knowledge for those already qualified.

On the rule that a praising passage serves the command it stands beside.