Its branches spread, run out, downward, from men down to the unmoving things, and upward, up to the abode of Brahmā the world-maker, the branches being the fruits of knowledge and action, according to each one's action and learning; they are grown great, made gross, by the qualities sattva, rajas and tamas as the stuff that builds them up, and the objects, sound and the rest, are their shoots, since from the branches that are the fruits of action, the body and the rest, the objects sprout, as it were, like shoots. The supreme root of the tree of transmigration, the material cause, was told before. Now the dispositions of passion, aversion and the rest, born of the fruit of action, the secondary, mid-level roots that are the causes of engagement in merit and demerit, are told: they too, as roots, are stretched out downward, lower in relation to the gods and the rest, following after action, action marked as merit and demerit being the thing that comes later, the dispositions that arise after its arising being 'action-following'; and that, particularly, in the world of men, for here the eligibility of men for action is well known. Now, this tree of transmigration as described.

And the roots run on downward too, the karma-attended ones, in the world of men. Of this tree, whose root is the world of Brahma and whose tip is man, downward, in the world of men, the roots run on; and those roots are karma-attended; that is, karmas alone are the attendant roots, and they come to be downward, in the world of men. For by the karmas done in the state of being a man, downward there come to be man, beast, and the rest, and upward gods and the rest.

Since beings exist, in a subtle form, even in the unmanifest, and also in the body and the rest, the branches are 'spread out below and above'. The 'shoots' are the sense-objects, which, through the gunas, sattva and the rest, have only an apparent happiness. The 'roots' are the forms of the Lord and the rest, for the Lord too gives the fruit through the binding-cord of action. So the Bhallaveya branch says, 'Brahman is its separate root, prakriti is the rooted one, sattva and the rest are its lower root; the beings are the branches, the Vedic chants are the leaves, and the gods, men and the lower creatures are the branches; for fruit is born from the leaves; the measures are the rootlets; release is the fruit, and non-release is the fruit; release is the sap, and non-release is the sap; there are branches in the unmanifest and branches in the manifest, and a root in the unmanifest and a root in the manifest. This ashvattha, whose leaves quiver with the gunas, is not stood firm, is not stood firm; for it never arises otherwise, never arises otherwise'.