Modern

These commentators carve out an important exception so the verse is not misread as discouraging compassion. The restrictions on place, time, and recipient do not apply to ordinary relief of the poor and needy. One holds plainly that giving alms to the poor and needy is not what this verse condemns. The other develops a full rule: in the gift of food, water, clothing, and medicine there is no special test of the recipient's worth; the need of the other is the test. To the hungry give food, to the thirsty water, to the unclothed clothing, to the sick medicine, and to one being wrongly frightened give the gift of fearlessness. If place, time, and worthy recipient all match, well and good; if not, it makes no difference. Even to unworthy recipients, food and water may be given in the measure that keeps life going, though not in a measure that enables fresh harm. This source also reconciles the verse with the teaching that in the present age (kali-yuga) dana is the one surviving foot of dharma, so that a gift given in any manner still works some welfare: even tamasic giving carries a partial letting-go of possessiveness, so the giver does not on its account fall to a downward birth, and the concession keeps the very habit of giving alive when minds are too impure to give well; the highest purity, however, comes only by offering all action to the Lord without desire for reward.

Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas

Śuddhādvaita

This commentator turns the chapter's threefold grid into a positive instruction for the devotee, sounding what he calls the chapter's central note of divine grace (pushti). The whole point of separating out the tamasic and rajasic forms, he holds, is to show that sacrifice, austerity, and gift stripped of all three gunas, that is, made nirguna, is what should be done, and he names these three in their concrete devotional form. The devotee's sacrifice is to be of the Lord's own glories, undertaken as a limb of devotion with prior dedication to the Lord, after the model of Yudhishthira. The devotee's austerity is to be the bearing of hardship for the Lord with a prior renouncing of every pleasure, or else austerity in the form of knowledge. And the devotee's gift is to be given, for the sake of accomplishing his devotion, to the Lord's devotee, the brahmana who knows the Veda.

Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

This commentator paints the tamasic gift as a vivid scene of inner corruption rather than mere ritual error. The tamasic donor gives away wealth secured by theft, in the evening or at night, in haunts of foreigners, in forests, at unclean spots or in public tents in the towns, to bards, jugglers, snake-charmers, prostitutes, gamblers, and workers of black magic; he grows infatuated with the dancer's beauty and the flatterers' songs in his ears, and greed for sense-objects rises in him like a ghost. Even when by sheer chance such a person lands in a holy place at an auspicious time and a worthy beggar happens to arrive, no faith stirs in him: he will not bow, will not offer water or a seat, will not let others honour the guest either, and if he gives at all he flings something onto the palm with insulting and foul words, then repeats again and again how much he gave, adding fresh insults. The verse's bare terms are thus expanded into a portrait of a heart wholly governed by darkness.

Sant Jñāneśvar