15.18

Supremacy here is argued entirely by exclusion — beyond the perishable, beyond the imperishable too — rather than by any positive description of what the third category actually is. That’s characteristic of how the Gita tends to handle its most absolute claims: it gestures at the boundary the concept transcends more readily than it specifies the concept’s own positive content, leaving the reader with a direction rather than a definition.

“Loke vede ca” — in the world and in the Veda — pairs two authorities that don’t normally certify the same claim: common report and scriptural testimony. Krishna isn’t citing scripture alone, which would only persuade someone already inside that tradition, or popular consensus alone, which proves nothing about ultimate reality; he’s claiming the title is recognized on both counts at once. A supremacy that needed only one of the two would be a narrower, more contestable claim than the verse is actually making.