Sattva, rajas and tamas: these are their names. 'Qualities' is a technical word; they are not qualities resting in a substance, like colour and the rest, and no distinctness of quality and quality-bearer is here intended. Rather, like qualities, they are ever dependent, and, being of the nature of ignorance toward the field-knower, they bind, as it were, the field-knower; because, making it their resort, they get a self, they are said to bind. And those, born of Nature, born of the Blessed Lord's māyā, bind, as it were, O mighty-armed one, the embodied one, the one who has a body, in the body, the imperishable one; its imperishability was told by the verse 'because it is beginningless' (Gītā 13.31) and the rest. Now, it was said that the embodied one is not stained; how, then, is it here said otherwise, that they bind it? We have set that aside by the word 'as it were': they bind it as it were. First the mark of sattva among sattva and the rest is told.

Sattva, rajas, and tamas, the three qualities, are particular natural traits attendant on the own-form of nature, definable solely by their effects, light and the rest; unmanifest in the state of nature, they become manifest in its changes, the great principle and the rest. They bind this embodied one, connected with the body of a god, a man, and the rest begun by the states from the great principle down to the particular elements, the embodied one who is undecaying and of itself unfit for connection with the qualities, abiding in the body; they bind it by the limiting adjunct of its abiding in the body. This is the meaning. The Lord states the shape of sattva, rajas, and tamas, and the manner of their binding.

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

To prompt the practice of the means, Krishna shows the manner of bondage, with 'sattva' and so on.