This verse names what each of the three gunas produces. A guna is one of the three basic qualities or strands that make up all of nature: sattva (clarity and balance), rajas (restless activity), and tamas (dullness and inertia). From sattva arises jnana, knowledge or understanding. From rajas arises lobha, greed. From tamas arise pramada (heedlessness or carelessness), moha (delusion), and ajnana (ignorance, the absence of knowledge). The commentators read this as a plain listing of cause and effect: each quality, when it grows strong, gives rise to its own kind of inner state.

Knowledge here means the light of understanding, a clear seeing of things as they are. Several commentators describe jnana as illumination working through all the faculties or instruments of perception, so that a sattvic mind sees clearly the way the sun lights up the day. Some sharpen this further: this knowledge is the direct vision or immediate apprehension of the true nature of the self and of things. Knowledge is, by the same logic, the presence of discrimination, while ignorance at the other end is simply its absence.

Greed is singled out as the characteristic fruit of rajas, and several commentators stress how restless and unfillable it is. Greed is a craving that cannot be satisfied even by gaining crores of objects; ever heaped up, it can never be filled. Because such longing is itself a standing cause of sorrow, the action that springs from it carries sorrow as its fruit. One commentator describes greed as having two faces: refusing to spend rightly, which leaves the mind agitated, and gathering wrongly through lies and deceit, which creates sin. Greed also hardens a person toward others, making him treat people as tools for his own gain.

Tamas produces a cluster of darkening states. Pramada is heedlessness or carelessness, an inattention that lets a person drift into wrong action without weighing consequences. Moha is delusion, which some describe as contrary or mistaken knowledge, taking things to be other than they are. And ajnana is ignorance itself, the plain absence of light and understanding. Together these make the fruit of tamasic action dark: it yields ignorance and, several add, sheer pain abounding in unconsciousness. One commentator notes that the word 'only' or 'too' attached to ignorance is meant to exclude light and activity, marking tamas as the absence of both the clarity of sattva and the energy of rajas.

The verse is offered as the reason behind the differing fruits of action described just before it. Several commentators frame it explicitly as giving the cause for why sattvic action yields bright happiness, rajasic action yields sorrow, and tamasic action yields ignorance: each result simply matches the quality that produced it. In this way the moral and experiential world is read as the guna-world unrolling its own colours, with effect bound to cause by strict gunic logic. The knowledge, greed, and delusion named here are the inner states that go on to shape the outer fruits a person reaps.