Īśvara is a special Puruṣa who has never been touched by kleśas, good or bad actions, their maturation, or corresponding vāsanās. A liberated being can be assigned a past boundary of bondage and a prakṛtilaya a future boundary; neither applies to Īśvara. He is always free and always Lord. The Bhāṣya makes his supreme sattva-nature and scripture mutually explanatory and regards their relation as beginningless. His lordship is free from both equality and superiority: if a second, equally powerful lord willed the contrary, one of their powers would necessarily be limited.

Because the seed of knowledge concerning past, present, future, and supersensible things admits of degrees, the Bhāṣya infers an upper limit: the omniscient one. His particular identity, however, can be learned only from tradition. Īśvara has no benefit of his own to accomplish; out of compassion he intends to raise Puruṣas in saṃsāra through teaching knowledge and dharma across cycles of creation and dissolution. The text gives as an example the primordial knower who, using a created citta, proclaimed the doctrine to the inquiring Āsuri.

Earlier teachers are delimited by time; Īśvara is not. The Bhāṣya therefore understands him as the teacher even of the earliest teachers and posits his perfection not only at the beginning of the present creation but at the beginnings of previous creations as well.

CYS2026 and TKVD2019 include sa eṣa in the sūtra and make Īśvara its explicit subject. PM2006 and the KYM Bhāṣya view KYMV2026 agree with the shorter PE1904 sūtra; KYMV2026 places sa eṣaḥ before it as Bhāṣya prose. The meaning remains recoverable from context, but the boundary between sūtra and commentary changes. The shorter sūtra remains the translation base.