The deluded, the undiscerning, slight Me, treat Me with contempt, when I have resorted to a human body, that is, when I deal with the world through a human body. They do not know My supreme state, the reality of the supreme Self, like space, more inward even than space; they do not know Me, the great Lord of all beings, their own Self. And so, struck down by their attitude of contempt for Me, those wretched ones are lost. How so?

Thus, Me, the great Lord of beings, all-knowing, of true resolve, the single cause of the whole world, who, out of supreme compassion, so that all might take refuge in Me, have resorted to a human body, the deluded, by their own sinful actions, slight; they think Me equal to an ordinary man. Not knowing this supreme state of Mine, the great Lord of beings, the state marked by the resort to manhood and grounded in My boundless compassion, generosity, gracious accessibility, tender love, and the rest, holding Me, by the mere resort to manhood, to be of the same kind as others, they slight Me. This is the meaning.

Then how is it that some make light of you, and what is their goal? To that Krishna speaks, with 'they make light' and so on. 'A human body' means a body that appears to the deluded as if human, not one that has a human form. So the Moksha-dharma says, 'whatever in this world is bound up with a body, O lord of men, all is pervaded by the five elements born of the Lord's thought. For the Lord is the creator of the world, the master, Narayana, the Vast; the inner self of beings, the speaker, with qualities and yet also without qualities. Hear, O best of kings, of the unmanifest dissolution of beings' (Mahabharata 12.347.11-13). And this is said in the context of the descents, so the descents are not to be doubted as separate things: 'He created many forms for the sake of His manifesting, the boar, the man-lion, the dwarf, and the human' (Mahabharata 12.349.37), for there the dividing of the descent-forms is told as belonging to the very time of the first creation. Hence their human nature and the rest is nothing but a delusion. 'The being who is the great Lord' is the great Lord who is a being. So the Bhabhravya branch says, 'beginningless and endless, of wholly full form, the Lord, the divine valour even of the boon-givers'; and 'the breathing-out of this great being' (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.4.10); and the Moksha-dharma names 'the Brahma-purohita, the Brahma-kayika, the Rajika, the Maharajika'.