Advaita Vedānta

These commentators keep the explanation close to the plain words and add a concrete illustration of what such delusion-born action looks like. The classic example given is Duryodhana's waging of the war: an action undertaken from mere non-discrimination, heedless of its ruinous consequence, of the destruction of bodily power, wealth, and army it would cost, and of the harm it would inflict. The loss here is read broadly as the destruction of one's power, wealth, and forces, and the whole act is summed up as begun from error, from want of discernment.

Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī

Viśiṣṭādvaita

This school sharpens the meaning of the governing delusion. The moha that drives tamasic action is identified specifically as ignorance of the supreme Person's agency, the failure to recognize that the Lord is the true agent behind all action. So the darkness is not only practical thoughtlessness about consequences and capacity; it is a deeper theological blindness to who is really acting, and the four unconsidered factors are read within that frame.

Rāmānujācārya

Śuddhādvaita

This school reads the four omissions in the strong key of liberation, so that the stakes become spiritual rather than merely worldly. The consequence (anubandha) is the bondage that follows the act, its future power to bind through good or bad fruit. The loss (kshaya) is the waste of the very body that is the means of liberation, now spent uselessly. The injury (himsa) is the violence that throws one's own self down into samsara, the round of birth and death. And paurusha is read not just as physical capacity but as the human end of liberation itself, along with one's dharma. One commentator calls such an act doubly dark, since it both begins in delusion and ends in delusion, and says it yields the opposite of what the doer imagined, springing from the illusion that one's own pleasure is at stake.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

Within the devotional reading, one voice spells out the consequence in vividly concrete terms: the bondage that follows is the bondage brought about by the king's officers and by the messengers of Yama, the lord of death, so that the after-effect is both worldly punishment and otherworldly reckoning, with the loss read as the destruction of merit. Another devotional voice expands the verse into a sustained meditation through a chain of images: tamasic action is barren, leaving no trace like lines drawn on water, as fruitless as churning rice gruel or grinding sand in an oil-mill. It is performed at the sacrifice of the precious human body, and like dragging a thorn-bush over lotuses or a moth dashing into a flame, it ruins the doer while also harming others and the world's happiness. Such action muddles virtue and vice hopelessly and, like fire that burns its own shelter or a flooding sea, pays no regard to the evil it brings on doer and others alike.

Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Modern

These commentators read the verse as a corrective and a practical rule rather than only a definition. One insists that the classification never depends on the external effects of the action but on the reason, the frame of mind, of the doer, and uses the verse to block the misreading that giving up the hope of fruit allows one to act indiscriminately; action done without seeing the consequence is tamasa, full stop. The other distinguishes the three grades by how much discrimination is engaged: tamasic action does not even bring viveka into play, whereas rajasic action at least uses it though stained by desire and ego, and he converts the four absences into a self-screening test for the seeker's own undertakings.

Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas