But the supreme Puruṣa is another, utterly unlike these two, called the supreme Self: He is supreme in regard to the selves made by ignorance, the body and the rest, and He is the Self, the inward conscious one, of all beings; so He is spoken of, called, in the Vedānta texts, the supreme Self. He is further marked: He who, having entered the triple world named earth, mid-air and heaven, by His own power of consciousness, strength and might, bears it, upholds it, by the mere fact of His own true being; the imperishable, He whose passing-away does not exist. Who is He? The Lord, the all-knowing, named Nārāyaṇa, of a ruling nature. For the Lord as explained the name 'supreme Puruṣa' is well known. Showing the meaningfulness of the name by the well-known explanation of it, the Blessed Lord shows Himself, that 'I, the Lord, am unsurpassed'.

But the highest Person is another, told as a thing other, as the supreme Self, than those two indicated by the words 'perishable' and 'imperishable', the bound and the freed Person. From the indication, in all the revealed texts, as 'the supreme Self', it is understood that the highest Person is a thing other than the bound and the freed Person. How? He who, having entered the three worlds, upholds them; 'world' is what is seen, the triad of that is the threefold world; the insentient, the conscious conjoined with it, and the freed conscious one, this triad apprehended by the means of knowledge; he who, having entered it as its self, upholds it, is a thing other than that pervaded and to-be-upheld triad. And He is a thing other than the said three worlds also for this reason: that He is undecaying, and the Lord. For one of undecaying nature is a thing other than the insentient of decaying nature, and than the conscious one who, by connection with it, follows it, who, having the fitness for connection with the insentient, was formerly so connected, and than the freed one too; and likewise He is the Lord of this triad of worlds, a thing other than that which is to be ruled.

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

Madhva's commentary treats verses 15.16 through 15.17 as a single passage; it is given in full at verse 15.16.