In a brāhmaṇa endowed with learning and humility, learning being the awareness of the Self and humility the calming of the mind, in such a learned and humble brāhmaṇa, and in a cow, an elephant, a dog, and an outcaste who cooks dog's flesh, the learned are seers of the same. In the brāhmaṇa of the best disposition, sāttvika, possessed of the highest refinement; in the cow of middling, rājasika, disposition, lacking refinement; and in the elephant and the rest, utterly tāmasika: in all these, untouched entirely by the qualities, sattva and the rest, and by the refinements born of them, untouched by the rājasika and tāmasika refinements, that one Brahman, the same and changeless, those have the habit of seeing whom we call the learned, the seers of the same. But surely such men, who eat with all alike, are at fault, by the remembered text 'in respect of worship, by treating the unequal and the equal as equal or unequal a man is at fault' (Gautama Smṛti 17.20). They are not at fault. How?

In the brahmin endowed with learning and humility, and in the cow, the elephant, the dog-cooker, and the rest, though these appear in utterly disparate forms, in the selves the learned, those who know the truth of the self, see sameness everywhere, since the self has knowledge for its single form. The disparity of form belongs to matter, not to the self; the self, having knowledge for its single form, is everywhere the same. So they see. This is the meaning.

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

With the intent that the seeing of the supreme Lord's own forms as the same everywhere is also a means to direct knowledge, Krishna says 'on the learned brahmana'.