Advaita Vedānta

The non-dual reading fills in the verse with detailed scriptural classification and reads it against the backdrop of scriptural rule being set aside. The gods are named as the Vasus and their kind; the yakshas are headed by the lord of wealth, the rakshasas by their own chiefs; the pretas are explained, drawing on the law-books, as those who fell from their own dharma and, after the body dropped, came to an airy ghost-body, bearing specific named classes, while the bhuta-troops include the band of mother-goddesses. The force of the teaching is that where scriptural injunction is absent, a person's standing in sattva or the rest is settled purely by what they spontaneously worship, and that worshippers of the gods grounded in sattva are rare among thousands.

Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This qualified-non-dual reading ties the three kinds of worship to three grades of fruit measured by happiness and pain. Sattvic faith, with the gods as its object, is the cause of surpassing happiness unmixed with pain; rajasic faith begets only slight happiness mixed with pain; tamasic faith is mostly pain and begets exceedingly little happiness. This reading also draws a sharp line: even scriptural acts done with faith differ in fruit by quality, but acts of giving, austerity, and sacrifice done outside scripture, being contrary to the Lord's command, yield not a particle of happiness, only calamity. The worshipped object is thus the outward inference for the inner disposition, and the gradation prepares the warning the Lord is about to make plain.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

This pure-non-dual, devotional reading turns the verse into a diagnostic mirror for the devotee's own taste. The sattvic person is drawn to the pramanika devas, those whom the scriptures themselves authorise as worship-objects, and that authorised status is itself the sattvic seal; the rajasic and tamasic, following only their own bent, end up before yakshas, rakshasas, pretas, and bhutas, which are the fitting houses of their own gunas. The verse is read not as a catalogue of cults but as a way for the devotee to see the configuration of their own liking. Even sattvic worship of the gods is only one rung on the upward ladder; the worshipper of the gods is not yet the worshipper of the Lord, and is meant to be drawn further, by scripture and by devotion to the Lord, beyond all the lower worships into devotion to Krishna.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

This devotional reading also takes the verse as the chapter's first diagnostic test: the colour of a person's faith is read off the colour of the deity they are drawn to worship. Worship of the Lord and the high gods is the sattvic sign; worship of yakshas and rakshasas, with their power-bargaining cast, is the rajasic sign; worship of pretas and bhutas, with their fear-and-darkness cast, is the tamasic sign. One source develops the moral colouring vividly: tamasic worship is a heap of sins, killing beings for offerings and worshipping on funeral grounds at dusk, and the threefold division is taught expressly so the listener will keep only the sattvic faith and cast away the other two. The same source adds a gracious assurance: one who acts with perfect sattvic faith and follows righteous elders gains the same liberating fruit as the learned, even without study of the metaphysical texts, just as a second lamp lit from the first loses no light.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

The modern readings keep the inference-from-worship framework and add their own precisions. One presses that the very point of the word 'they worship' is not to declare that worshippers go wherever their deities go; the question being answered concerned the inner standing of those who set scripture aside yet worship with faith, so worship is named only to show how that standing can be recognised. This same reading also carefully protects scripturally enjoined acts done without selfish motive: devout, dutiful rites for one's own ancestors, or scripture-prescribed rites for the departed performed selflessly, are sattvic, not tamasic, because what saves is obedience to the command of sage, scripture, and the Lord. Another modern reading notes that the lustful and hypocritical, who lack scriptural faith altogether, cannot be neatly slotted as sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic, since their drive to act is itself a rajasic feature, which is why the next verses sort all people instead into the godlike and the demoniac.

Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas