Text 11

ye yatha mam prapadyante
tams tathaiva bhajamy aham
mama vartmanuvartante
manushyah partha sarvasah

Translation

As all surrender unto Me, I reward them accordingly. Everyone follows My path in all respects, O son of Pritha.

Commentary by Srila Prabhupada

Everyone is searching for Krishna in the different aspects of His manifestations. Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is partially realized in His impersonal brahmajyoti effulgence and as the all-pervading Supersoul dwelling within everything, including the particles of atoms. But Krishna is fully realized only by His pure devotees. Consequently, Krishna is the object of everyone’s realization, and thus anyone and everyone is satisfied according to one’s desire to have Him. In the transcendental world also, Krishna reciprocates with His pure devotees in the transcendental attitude, just as the devotee wants Him. One devotee may want Krishna as supreme master, another as his personal friend, another as his son, and still another as his lover. Krishna rewards all the devotees equally, according to their different intensities of love for Him. In the material world, the same reciprocations of feelings are there, and they are equally exchanged by the Lord with the different types of worshipers. The pure devotees both here and in the transcendental abode associate with Him in person and are able to render personal service to the Lord and thus derive transcendental bliss in His loving service. As for those who are impersonalists and who want to commit spiritual suicide by annihilating the individual existence of the living entity, Krishna helps also by absorbing them into His effulgence. Such impersonalists do not agree to accept the eternal, blissful Personality of Godhead; consequently they cannot relish the bliss of transcendental personal service to the Lord, having extinguished their individuality. Some of them, who are not firmly situated even in the impersonal existence, return to this material field to exhibit their dormant desires for activities. They are not admitted into the spiritual planets, but they are again given a chance to act on the material planets. For those who are fruitive workers, the Lord awards the desired results of their prescribed duties, as the yajnesvara; and those who are yogis seeking mystic powers are awarded such powers. In other words, everyone is dependent for success upon His mercy alone, and all kinds of spiritual processes are but different degrees of success on the same path. Unless, therefore, one comes to the highest perfection of Krishna consciousness, all attempts remain imperfect, as is stated in the Srimad-Bhagavatam (2.3.10):

akamah sarva-kamo va
moksha-kama udara-dhih
tivrena bhakti-yogena
yajeta purusham param

“Whether one is without desire [the condition of the devotees], or is desirous of all fruitive results, or is after liberation, one should with all efforts try to worship the Supreme Personality of Godhead for complete perfection, culminating in Krishna consciousness.”

Commentary by Sri Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakur

“Your dedicated devotees consider your birth and activities to be eternal, but others such as jnanis, surrendering to you for the purpose of perfecting jnana or other goals, do not consider your birth and activities to be eternal.”

“In whatever way they worship me (prapadyante), also give them the fruits of their worship (bhajami) in a similar manner.”

The meaning is this. Those who think that my birth and activities are eternal and, having a particular desire for my respective pastimes, worship me, attain happiness. And I, because I am the Lord, can do, or not do, or do anything. But making them my associates, with them I appear and disappear in this world at the appropriate time, in order to give my birth and pastimes an eternal nature, favoring them at every moment, bestowing upon them the fruit of their worship, prema.

The jnanis and others who surrender unto me thinking of my birth and activities as temporary, and thinking of my deity forms as material – I throw those jnanis again and again into the noose of maya with its temporary births and deaths, and bestow upon them the sorrow of birth and death, the fruit of their worship.

But those jnanis who accept the eternal nature of my birth activities and consider my deity form to be sac cid ananda, an surrender to me for perfection of their jnana, I liberate thos jnanis, since they desire the destruction of their gross and subt bodies, and I give them the bliss of brahman. I bestow up them the desired result of their worship: the destruction of birth and death born from ignorance.

Therefore, not only devotees surrender to me, but rather everyone (sarvasah), all men, jnanis, karmis, yogis, and worshippers other than the devatas, follow my path. Jnana, karma and other processes are all my path, since I am the essence of all those paths.