Being stainless, like a crystal gem, sattva is illuminating and free of ill, free of disturbance; and it binds. How? By attachment to happiness: the bringing about of a connection of happiness, which is an object, with the Self, which is a subject, by the cognition 'I am happy', the clinging to happiness, is itself false; this is that ignorance. For a quality of the object does not belong to the subject; and desire and the rest, down to steadiness, the Blessed Lord has said are qualities of the field alone, of the object. So, by ignorance alone, its own quality, marked as the want of discernment between object and subject, it attaches one, as it were, to happiness, which is not the Self; it makes the unattached as if attached, the unhappy as if happy. Likewise by attachment to knowledge: 'knowledge', from its keeping company with happiness, is a quality of the field alone, of the object, of the inner instrument, not of the Self; for if it were a quality of the Self, attachment would be untenable, and bondage untenable. Attachment to knowledge and the rest is to be understood like attachment to happiness, O sinless one.

Of sattva, rajas, and tamas, the own-form of sattva is of this kind: by being stainless it is illuminating; stainlessness is the absence of any nature that veils light and happiness; the meaning is that, by having the single nature of begetting light and happiness, it is the cause of light and of happiness. Light is the awareness of the truth of a thing. 'Free of disease': the effect called disease is not found in it, so it is free of disease, the cause of health. This quality called sattva binds this embodied one by attachment to happiness and by attachment to knowledge; that is, it begets in the person attachment to happiness and attachment to knowledge. For, when attachment to knowledge and to happiness has arisen, one engages in their means, the worldly and the Vedic; and from that one is born in the wombs that are the means of experiencing their fruit; so sattva binds the person by the door of attachment to happiness and knowledge. What is said is that sattva begets knowledge and happiness, and again begets attachment to those two.

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.