Tamas is born of ignorance and darkens the seer; it needs no craving to bind you, only a fog you have not yet cleared.

What Shankara's own brief comment here actually supports.

Shankara affirms that tamas is born of ignorance and brings a lack of clear sight to everyone who wears a body, binding through carelessness, laziness, and sleep. His remaining words at this verse are mostly transitional, noting that Krishna is now stating in compressed form how each quality does its binding work. A fuller Advaita picture of tamas as the density to be dissolved before knowledge dawns belongs to his teaching elsewhere, not to what is preserved here.

Read through Ramanuja's precise definition of contrary knowing.

Ramanuja defines ignorance as whatever runs contrary to true knowledge, the awareness of a thing's real nature, making tamas the cause of erroneous cognition in the embodied self. He gives an unusually careful account of sleep: the senses ceasing through their own weariness, with dream as the outer senses' ceasing alone and deep, dreamless sleep as the mind's ceasing too. He reads this verse as naming the chief door by which each quality binds, part of a larger argument that all three qualities stand outside the self's true nature under the Lord.

A single sharp reversal, not a developed reading.

Madhva's preserved comment here is brief but pointed: he reverses the ordinary direction of 'born of ignorance,' arguing instead that ignorance arises from tamas, and points to 14.17 for support. This grammatical correction is the whole of what securely survives from him at this verse; any fuller account of tamas as a binding force in his system draws on his teaching elsewhere.

Honestly thin here; the genuine material sits one verse earlier.

No comment keyed specifically to 14.8 survives from Abhinavagupta. His actual words treat 14.6 through 14.8 as a single unit anchored at 14.6, where he calls heedlessness the squandering of a hard-won human birth, sloth a slackness toward one's own good, and sleep a despised going-slack. On a Kashmir-Saiva reading, one would extend this to say tamas is not an alien darkness but a self-contraction, consciousness folding in on its own freedom; that extension is a reasonable inference from his wider philosophy, clearly offered as such, not as his stated word on this verse.

A phenomenology of the experience, from Sridhara.

Sridhara traces tamas to the veiling portion of nature and from there to mohana, the begetter of confusion. His distinctive stress is mechanism: tamas does not draw the self toward any object the way sattva draws toward happiness or rajas toward action. It binds purely by veiling, leaving the self to drift with nothing in particular pulling it anywhere. This reads less like a sectarian claim than a teacher's care to describe exactly what the experience feels like from the inside.

The absence of attachment as the graver condition.

Madhusudana notices that the word used for how sattva and rajas bind, sanga, attachment, is conspicuously missing from how tamas is described. Sattva binds by clinging to happiness and knowledge, rajas by clinging to action, but tamas needs no craving at all; it binds simply by being what it is. He treats this as the graver condition of the three, since there is no desire here to examine and redirect, only a darkness that must first be dispelled before any clearer choice becomes possible.