Bhagavad Gītā Chapter 2, Verse 28: Krishna to Arjuna — Sāṅkhya-Yoga

Bhāṣyakāra purports

• Śaṅkaraadvaita

  Beings constituted as aggregates of body and sense-organs — sons, friends, and the rest — were avyakta (unmanifest, literally adarśana, non-obtainment to perception) before birth; they are vyakta (manifest, perceivable) only in the middle interval between birth and death; and after death they return to that same avyakta condition, for death too is nothing but adarśana, non-appearance to the instruments of perception. The Purāṇa clinches this: adaśanādāpatitaḥ punaścādaśanaṃ gataḥ — nāsau tava na tasya tvaṃ vṛthā kā paridevanā ("He has come from the unseen and gone back to the unseen; he is not yours nor you his — what grief is this, and for whom?"). The so-called lamentation of Arjuna is therefore a bhrānti (confusion) about entities that appeared, disappeared, and are now imagined as permanently lost — but the permanent was never the appearance, and the appearance was never yours to keep.

  divergence: Śaṅkara's reading closes grief by collapsing the apparent permanence of the perceived interval into the bookending adarśana: both ends are avyakta, so the middle vyaktatā (manifestedness) carries no independent ontological weight. This is a purely epistemic move — bhrānti, not ontological argument.

• Rāmānujaviśiṣṭādvaita

  Beings such as humans are dravyas (real substances) whose pūrva-avasthā (prior state) before birth is anupalabdha (unperceived), whose madhyama-avasthā (middle state) as a human or other form is upalabdha (perceived), and whose uttara-avasthā (later state) after death is again anupalabdha — all three being states of the same real, continuing substance moving through its svabhāva (own nature). Since the substance is real throughout and never actually ceases — only changes its perceptibility to us — the paridevanā (lamentation) has no nimittam (occasion, ground): what is lamented was never truly lost, and what appears lost was never the substance but only a condition the substance passed through. Rāmānuja adds that even on the śarīrātmavāda (body-is-ātman thesis) the argument holds, for the substance continues in its conditions; and beyond that, the ātman distinct from the body is of a nature so āścaryarūpa (wondrous) that even seeing, speaking of, and hearing about it correctly is durlabha (rare) — which is itself a further reason that kṛṣṇa-kainkarya (devoted service to Bhagavān) is the only adequate response to its reality.

  divergence: Rāmānuja uniquely preserves the reality of the dravya through all three states — the beings are not dismissed as bhrānti-objects but affirmed as real substances whose states vary. Grief is displaced not by denying the beings but by showing that what is lamented (permanent loss) does not match the metaphysics of what actually happens to them.

• Madhvadvaita

  This verse spaṣṭayati (makes explicit) what the preceding argument established: that the jīvas appearing in the vyakta-madhya (manifest middle) are not newly originated realities but perpetually dependent conscious entities whose visibility to us follows the cycles of prakṛti (primordial matter) without affecting their sva-rūpa (intrinsic nature). Hari alone is the unqualified lord of manifestation and dissolution; the jīva's passage through avyakta and vyakta states is under His regulation, not an independent process subject to Arjuna's grief or rescue. Because the jīva's reality is entirely in Hari's keeping and the jīva's avyaktatā (unmanifest condition) is nothing other than its withdrawal from the field of others' perception while remaining fully real to Hari, there is no cause for paridevanā (lamentation) — the one lamented is not in Arjuna's power and never was.

  divergence: Madhva's terse supplied commentary — 'tadeva spaṣṭayati avyaktādīni' — signals that for him this verse requires no independent elaboration: it simply makes visible what jīva-Hari ontology already entails. The rendering draws on that ontology directly rather than manufacturing verse-specific exegesis the commentator did not supply.

• Vallabhaśuddhādvaita

  Vallabha reads the verse on two tracks simultaneously. If bhūta (being) here denotes kārya-śarīra (the body as effect), then avyakta at origin and dissolution means pradhāna (the primordial material principle), and the verse establishes that all bodies are kāraṇātmaka (constituted by their material cause) throughout — the middle vyaktatā (manifestedness) is only the kāryatā (effect-condition) becoming visible, with no grounds for grief since ādi and anta are both avyakta. If bhūta denotes ātmans themselves, then avyakta refers to the akṣara mahad-bhūta (the imperishable great being, the supreme ground) from which the ātmans have vyuccarita (emerged) and into which they return — their middle manifestness is deha-ātmatā (identification with the body) produced by Kṛṣṇa's own icchā (will), not by the ātman's independent movement. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad confirms that the ātman's seeming smallness (aṇutva) and inferiority are mādī-icchā-guṇa-kṛta (produced by qualities arising from My will) and māyā-buddhi-guṇa-kṛta (produced by qualities of māyā-mind) — not the ātman's sva-rūpa.

  divergence: Vallabha's double-track reading is unique in this panel: he refuses to choose between a materialist and a spiritualist interpretation of bhūta, reading both simultaneously as establishing complementary aspects of the same puṣṭi-mārga thesis — that all manifestation is Kṛṣṇa's icchā, and grief misattributes that creative will to the griever's possession.

• Śrīdharabhakti

  Śrīdhara reads the verse as extending the anti-grief argument from ātman to deha (body) and its upādhis (limiting adjuncts): even if one were to grieve for the body-and-sense composite rather than the ātman, the svabhāva (nature) of such bodies is to stand in kāraṇātmikā sthiti (causal-form subsistence) before birth — avyakta here being pradhāna as ādi-pūrvarūpa (primordial prior form). The middle state of vyaktatā is only the abhivyakti-avasthā (state of coming-into-appearance), the janma-maraṇa-antarāla (interval between birth and death). Return to avyakta at dissolution is therefore not annihilation but laya (merging back), as an effect merges into its cause. The pratibuddhasya svapna-dṛṣṭa-vastuṣu iva (as with one awakened from a dream regarding dream-objects) analogy is the crux: the awakened person does not grieve for the people seen in the dream even though they appeared, disappeared, and were experienced as real — the paridevanā (lamentation) Arjuna is enacting is exactly this, and its unreasonableness is identical.

  divergence: Śrīdhara's distinctive contribution is the dream-analogy applied to the body-level argument rather than the ātman-level: he meets Arjuna's stated grief (for Bhīṣma, Droṇa, the kula, the bodies) on its own terms and dissolves it via the dream-waking transition. The other schools address grief by elevating to ātman; Śrīdhara dissolves it at the level of the very objects grieved over.

• Madhusūdanaadvaita-bhakti

  Madhusūdana runs two complete exegetical passes. On the first pass: the śarīra (bodies) are pṛthivyādi-bhūtamaya (composed of elements beginning with earth), unperceived before birth, perceived after birth until death, and again unperceived at dissolution — and this is not mere sequence but metaphysical structure: because the Advaita commitment is dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi (the perceived world is co-arising with perception), whatever is not at beginning and end does not truly exist even in the middle — ādāv-ante-ca-yan-nāsti vartamāne-api-tat-tathā. These bodies are therefore mithyābhūta (of the nature of the false-apparent), atyanta-tuccha (utterly negligible), like appearances in a dream or a magic-show — the waking person does not grieve for the friends seen in the dream. On the second pass: the ākāśādi-mahābhūtas (the great elements beginning with space) have avyakta, the avyākṛta (the undifferentiated, avidyopahita-caitanya, consciousness conditioned by avidyā), as their ādi and nidhana — the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad confirms: taddhedaṃ tarhyavyākṛtam āsīt tan-nāmarūpābhyām-eva-vyākriyata ("this was then undifferentiated; it differentiated into name-and-form"). If even the most fundamental elements are negligible when known by their true ground, their effects in the form of Arjuna's kinsmen are all the more negligible as occasions for paridevanā. The Bhārata address closes the argument: one of pure lineage is adhikārin (qualified) to receive this śāstrīya artha (scriptural meaning) — the address is not ornamental but a signal of fitness for comprehension.

  divergence: Madhusūdana is the only commentator in this panel to run two complete and independent exegetical arguments for the same verse — the dṛṣṭi-sṛṣṭi dream-argument (śarīra reading) and the mahābhūta-avyākaraṇa argument (cosmological reading) — and then to read the Bhārata vocative as itself carrying doctrinal weight about the adhikārin's fitness.