Bhaktivedanta VedaBase: Bhagavad-gītā As It Is 9.15

jñāna-yajñena cāpy anye

yajanto mām upāsate

ekatvena pṛthaktvena

bahudhā viśvato-mukham

SYNONYMS

jñāna-yajñena — by cultivation of knowledge; ca — also; api — certainly; anye — others; yajantaḥ — sacrificing; mām — Me; upāsate — worship; ekatvena — in oneness; pṛthaktvena — in duality; bahudhā — in diversity; viśvataḥ-mukham — and in the universal form.

TRANSLATION

Others, who engage in sacrifice by the cultivation of knowledge, worship the Supreme Lord as the one without a second, as diverse in many, and in the universal form.

PURPORT

This verse is the summary of the previous verses. The Lord tells Arjuna that those who are purely in Kṛṣṇa consciousness and do not know anything other than Kṛṣṇa are called mahātmā; yet there are other persons who are not exactly in the position of mahātmā but who worship Kṛṣṇa also, in different ways. Some of them have already been described as the distressed, the financially destitute, the inquisitive, and those who are engaged in the cultivation of knowledge. But there are others who are still lower, and these are divided into three: (1) he who worships himself as one with the Supreme Lord, (2) he who concocts some form of the Supreme Lord and worships that, and (3) he who accepts the universal form, the viśvarūpa of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and worships that. Out of the above three, the lowest, those who worship themselves as the Supreme Lord, thinking themselves to be monists, are most predominant. Such people think themselves to be the Supreme Lord, and in this mentality they worship themselves. This is also a type of God worship, for they can understand that they are not the material body but are actually spiritual soul; at least, such a sense is prominent. Generally the impersonalists worship the Supreme Lord in this way. The second class includes the worshipers of the demigods, those who by imagination consider any form to be the form of the Supreme Lord. And the third class includes those who cannot conceive of anything beyond the manifestation of this material universe. They consider the universe to be the supreme organism or entity and worship that. The universe is also a form of the Lord.

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His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, Founder Ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness