I see You everywhere, on every side, of many arms, bellies, mouths and eyes, of endless forms. I see no end of the God, an end being a termination; no middle, the middle being the interval between two extremities; nor again do I see Your beginning, O Lord of the universe, O universal-formed one. Further.

This is a brief sub-gloss. For a fuller reading of this verse, see Madhusūdana, Śaṅkara, or Rāmānuja above.

I see you on every side, with many arms, bellies, faces, and eyes, of endless form. Lord of the universe, body of the universe, governor of the universe, of universal form: since you are endless, I see no end of you, no middle, and again no beginning of you.

The word 'many' (aneka) denotes the endless; He Himself will say 'of endless arms' (11.19), and there is 'that has hands and feet on every side' and the like. The supplementary hymns of the Rigveda say, 'with eye on every side, with face on every side, with arm on every side, with foot on every side, the one God brings forth heaven and earth, fashioning them with His two arms and with His wings' (Rigveda 2.2.4.24; Mahanarayana Upanishad 2.2; Shvetashvatara Upanishad 3.3); and the Yajurveda has the same. The word 'all' (vishva) denotes the endless, as the lexicon has it, 'all, the whole, vishva, the endless, and the full'; and the Bhabhravya branch has, 'of endless arm, of endless foot, of endless form, of many faces, the One'. The statement of greatness and the rest holds also by His having that for His very nature; otherwise 'the beginningless supreme Brahman' (13.12) and the like would not be apt. In one place His forms are endless, and so He is 'of endless form'; in another He is 'beyond measure'. Both are stated, as the Yajurveda says, 'that which is higher than the high, greater than the great, that which is one, unmanifest, of endless form'; and from the very endlessness of the unmanifest the immeasurability of the greatness of the great is established. The Aditya Purana says, 'enveloping the great and standing about the principal one, of Him, the endless, there is no end, nor any reckoning'. And each one of those forms is itself endless; this holds in one place, as the supplementary hymns of the Rigveda say, 'uncountable are His bodies, all of them knowing and bereft of measure'. And the Chandogya says, 'as great as is this space, so great is this space within the heart; both heaven and earth are set within it, and both fire and wind, and both the sun and the moon' (Chandogya Upanishad 8.1.3). And the Bhagavata has, 'the canopy of His hood crushed by the blow of Krishna's heel, of Krishna under whom the world lies sunk beneath His overwhelming weight' (Bhagavata 10.16.31). Nor is this unfitting, since the Lord's power is beyond thought. The Vishnu Purana says, 'those states which are beyond thought, one should not yoke them with reasoning'; and the scripture says, 'this insight is not to be reached by reasoning' (Katha Upanishad 1.2.9). An over-extension is to be ruled out by the force of the great purport and by the strength of the texts. It is not that a thing seen by a means of knowledge is set aside merely because no thing like a pot was seen to behave so; in the case of certain things, the settlement made by the texts is accepted by treating the matter as beyond thought. As the Jabali supplementary text and scripture say, 'the qualities heard of in God, even those much opposed to one another, and even those not heard of, are no ground for doubt here; and the faults, the thinkable and the unthinkable alike, heard of, are not so taken by the unknowing; thus, in the Supreme and elsewhere, there is, in due order, a settlement of the qualities and the faults, the heard and the unheard'. To rule out a figurative reading, He says 'and no middle'; otherwise that endlessness would be established only by His having a beginning and an end. The Shandilya branch says, 'of universal form, of full form, He is of universal form, of unstinted form, and therefore this One is of endless form, for there is no destruction of Him'.