Advaita Vedānta

These commentators read the verse as a teaching about the inner organ conditioned by past works, and they are careful to limit its scope. The varied faith described here belongs to the whole class of creatures who lack scriptural discriminating knowledge; the person spoken of is the one qualified for action, not for liberating knowledge. One commentator maps the gradations of mind onto whole classes of beings: predominant sattva for the gods, sattva overpowered by rajas for the yakshas, sattva overpowered by tamas for ghosts and spirits, with human minds mostly mixed. Another raises the objection that elsewhere faith is named as the very inner means of seeing the Self, so how can it be called rajasic or tamasic, and answers that it is the conditioned intellect, not faith in its highest use, that takes the lower forms; he illustrates with the worshipper who treats his dead father as a deity, as a yaksha, or as a hungry ghost, and reaps the favor or ruin proper to each.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Ānandagiri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators agree that sattva means the inner organ, but they widen it: the word is taken to indicate also the body, the senses, and the rest spoken of before, so faith conforms to the whole embodied instrument, not the mind alone. They give 'made of faith' a precise sense: it means a transformation of faith. Whatever faith a man is joined with, he is just that transformation of it; and crucially, if he is joined with faith bearing on meritorious action, he is joined with the fruit of that action. So the verse fastens an operative principle: the candidate is, at bottom, his faith, and faith is the index by which the joining with fruit is decided and by which the candidate is to be sorted.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Dvaita

These commentators take sattva, glossed as citta or mind, to point beyond the mind to consciousness itself, that is, to the jiva, the individual living self. The concern is that the verse should be seen to teach not merely the nature of faith but, resting on it, the nature of the jiva who holds that faith. So the line is read straight as a statement about the person: he whose faith is rajasic is rajasic, he whose faith is tamasic is tamasic, with the gradations understood to continue.

Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha

Śuddhādvaita

For these commentators the verse is the inner principle of the whole chapter, and they read it through the lens of the soul as a portion of the Lord. The man and his faith are not two; the person is made of the very faith he carries. One commentator names the jiva expressly as mad-amsha, the Lord's own portion, who in his human shape is constituted of faith; the root inner stuff (mula-sattva) of the devotee is the indweller's own giving, and the faith that takes its shape from that root is the inward configuration into which the chapter's whole catalogue of worship, food, sacrifice, austerity, and gift will fit. The diagnosis of the devotee's faith is the diagnosis of his very form.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator glosses sattva simply as a synonym for one's own nature. He adds a distinctive note: the self is necessarily bound up with a faith that runs above his other activity. Faith is not just one disposition among many; it is the overarching commitment that stands higher than a person's ordinary doings, and the person is to be understood as made of just that faith.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Bhakti

These commentators stress that faith is in its own essence sattvic, since scripture lists it among the functions of sattva; its threefoldness belongs to it only borrowed from the threefold mind in which it rests. One offers vivid images: water is a life-preserver, yet becomes fatal mixed with poison, pungent with pepper, sweet with cane-juice, and just so faith takes the color of the guna it is mixed with; the whole universe is cast in the mould of faith. They also point the verse forward toward worship: those of sattvic inner being, by sattvic scriptural ordinance, worship the sattvic gods alone, the rajasic worship yakshas and rakshasas, the tamasic worship departed spirits and hosts of ghosts. One adds a note of hope: such people can, through the powerful good company of the Vedic faithful, conquer their innate dispositions and even become qualified for the Veda.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators read sattva and the previous verse's svabhava as synonyms, both meaning natural temperament, and they emphasize that faith is the truest measure of character: a man is what his faith has made him, and his conduct and conviction (nishtha) are shaped by it. One observes that since the self is independent, this bodily temperament can gradually be changed by practice and renunciation, so faith is not a fixed sentence. One develops the verse into a full diagnosis of the spiritual life: sattvic faith turns toward God and is the divine wealth to be cultivated, while rajasic and tamasic faith turn toward the world and are to be abandoned; faith is the gate through which every path of karma, jnana, or bhakti opens, and underneath all the second-hand tastes laid on a person by company and teaching lies one native longing, to be freed from all suffering and to gain lasting great joy, which is the root from which true faith grows.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas