The Puruṣa, the enjoyer, standing in Nature, which is marked by ignorance and transformed into the form of effect and instrument, that is, having gone to Nature as the Self: since it is so, it enjoys, it experiences, the qualities born of Nature, made evident in the forms of pleasure, pain and delusion, with the cognitions 'I am happy', 'I am unhappy', 'I am deluded', 'I am learned'. Even though ignorance is present, while the qualities, pleasure, pain and delusion, are being enjoyed, the attachment, the sense of self, toward them is the chief cause of birth, by the scripture 'as is his desire, so is his resolve' (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 4.4.5) and the like. He states this: the cause, the occasion, is the attachment to the qualities, the attachment of this Puruṣa, the enjoyer, to the qualities, in his births in good and evil wombs. Or else the word 'transmigration' is to be supplied: the cause of this transmigration, of birth in good and evil wombs, is the attachment to the qualities. Good wombs are the wombs of the gods and the like; evil wombs are the wombs of beasts and the like; and from the force of the words the wombs of men too, being neither wholly good nor wholly evil, are to be seen as included. What this comes to is: the ignorance named the standing in Nature, and the attachment, the desire, toward the qualities, are the cause of transmigration. And it is said in order to be cast off. The cause of the cessation of this is well known, in the scripture of the Gītā, to be knowledge and dispassion together with renunciation; and that knowledge, whose object is the field and the field-knower, was set forth before, 'knowing which one reaches the deathless' (Gītā 13.12), told by the way of excluding what is other and of denying qualities not its own. That very thing to be known is now pointed out again, directly.

This person, abiding in this body, by way of the resolves and the rest that conform to the body's activity, becomes the overseer and the consenter of the body; and likewise it becomes the supporter of the body; and likewise the experiencer of the pleasure and pain born of the body's activity. So, by the governing of the body, the supporting of the body, and the owning of the body, it is the great lord toward the body, the senses, and the mind. So it will be said, 'whatever body the lord takes up, and whatever he leaves, he goes taking these, as the wind takes scents from their seat'. And in this body, toward the body, the senses, and the mind, it is called the supreme Self too: the word 'self' is used right after of the body and of the mind, in 'some, by meditation, see the self in the self by the self'; and from the word 'too' it is understood that it is called the great lord as well. The person, the higher one, told in 'beginningless, having Me as its highest' and the rest, this person, of unbounded knowledge-power, becomes, by the attachment to the qualities made by the beginningless conjunction with nature, the great lord and the supreme Self of this mere body.

This is a brief sub-gloss. For a fuller reading of this verse, see Madhusūdana, Śaṅkara, or Rāmānuja above.

Madhvacharya does not comment on this verse.