The food dear to the dull heart is named by six plain marks of decline.
Cold past its time, sapless, foul, cooked the day before, someone else's leftovers, unfit even to offer: this is what the person ruled by dullness reaches for without complaint. Each mark mirrors, point for point, what freshness and clarity are not.
Food gone cold past its time, sapless, foul-smelling, cooked the day before, someone else's leftovers, and food unfit even to offer: this is what a person ruled by dullness loves to eat.
The reading read whole, as one unhurried piece
Where it stands
Two verses back you met the food loved by the clear-minded, and one verse back the food loved by the restless. Now comes the third and final kind: the food dear to someone sunk in dullness and inertia.
The teaching
Six marks name it. It has stood past its watch, a fixed span of hours, and gone cold. Its essence has been squeezed or dried out. It smells foul. It was cooked the day before, with a night having passed over it. It is what someone else has already eaten from. It is unclean, unfit even to be offered. Shankara parses these terms with brisk economy and moves on; Ramanuja works through the same six marks but adds a precise social distinction, that ordinary leftovers differ from the sanctified remnant of a teacher's plate, and then turns the whole list into direct counsel: food made of dullness, eaten, makes dullness grow in the eater, so anyone seeking his own good should eat only clear food. Sridhara reads the list as dullness given a shape you can taste and smell, sitting as far from the living freshness of sattva as food can sit. Madhusudana adds the sharpest structural point: each mark here is the near-exact opposite of a sattvic quality named earlier, and where rajasic food opposes sattva only visibly, through named sufferings, tamasic food opposes it both visibly and invisibly, tamas here outrunning even rajas in its distance from the good. Two of the six commentaries on file are honestly thin: Madhva's surviving Bhashya offers no comment on this line at all, and Abhinavagupta's extant remark covers this verse only as part of a block running from 17.7, with the substance of his comment lodged there rather than here. Both silences are left as silences, not filled with invented words.
The doubt that rises
The verse names no fruit for this food, no sorrow or disease spelled out the way the previous verse named them for restless food. Is that omission a small oversight, or is it itself trying to tell you something about how far the dull eater has already drifted?
Where the paths divide
Read close to the grammar of the six terms.
Shankara glosses each term briskly, half-cooked, its goodness gone, foul, stale, leftover, unfit for sacrifice, and moves straight to the next topic, the threefold division of sacrifice. Madhusudana takes the philology further, recording that some read the second term as naming churned milk with its essence drawn out rather than simply repeating the first term, and adding that tamasic food opposes sattvic food in both a visible and an invisible way, more thoroughly than rajasic food does.
Read as counsel toward a specific choice, not mere description.
Ramanuja distinguishes ordinary leftovers, which are tamasic, from the blessed remnant of a teacher's or elder's meal, which is not. He then states plainly that food made of dullness, once eaten, makes dullness grow in the eater, so the exchange between eater and eaten runs in both directions; the seeker who wants his own good is told, without qualification, to eat only clear food for the sake of the clarity it nourishes.
An honest silence, with any extension clearly labeled as conditional.
No comment on this verse survives from Madhva; the record states plainly that he offers none here. Extending his wider system, one might reason that a soul's own inherited nature already inclines it toward the very food that expresses its guna, so a craving for stale or impure food would itself be a symptom of that constitution, but this is an extrapolation from his larger framework, not anything he wrote at this line.
Comment lodged at 17.7; here only a flagged conditional extension.
Abhinavagupta's surviving note treats 17.7 through 17.10 as a single span, explicitly sitting at 17.7 rather than here, and establishes only the general frame that food, like faith just before it, divides into three by sattva and the rest. A conditional Kashmir Shaiva extension, not his stated word, might read the craving for stale and lifeless food as awareness curling tightly around its own most inert possibility.
For food transfigured by being offered before it is eaten.
Where the broader devotional tradition carries the teaching forward, food's final measure is not simply whether it escapes the six marks named here, but whether it has first been offered to the Lord and received back as grace; on such a reading, any food, however plain, is lifted once it is turned into worship rather than mere sustenance. Ramanuja's own stress on eating for the growth of clarity moves toward this without stating the fully devotional case.
For ordinary life, where the reach of the hand tells the truth.
Read in a contemporary idiom, this verse names a diagnostic rather than a menu: what someone tolerates eating without complaint or a second thought, stale, flat, unclean, tells you plainly whether inertia or clarity is gaining ground in him. The corrective the commentators already give, choosing fresh food to grow clarity, becomes an ordinary daily test rather than a special religious observance.
The commentators agree closely on the six marks and on the counsel to avoid such food, then differ on what the verse's silence about consequences means, and on how far a devotional reading can carry ordinary food past the categories named here altogether. Whether the weight of the verse rests on the food's own description, on the eater's inner drift, or on what devotion can lift a plain meal into, is left open here, along with an honest acknowledgment that two of the six voices drawn on for this verse left no direct word on it at all.
A question to carry
What do you reach for without a second thought when you are tired or distracted, and what might that reaching, more than any deliberate choice, be telling you about where your attention has quietly gone?
Where this teaching travels
Verses that sit near this one, each going its own way; follow whichever calls you.
May what you reach for without thinking slowly come to match what you would choose on purpose, and may even a plain meal, offered first, be received back as grace.
Each school is voiced from the commentators named above. Their full words, every translation, and where the schools agree and differ wait in the reading desk just below. Open the commentary desk.
Having named the food loved by the clear-minded and then the restless in the two verses just before, Krishna completes the threefold picture here with the food dear to the person of dullness.
Where they agreethe convergence
Across schools and centuries the commentators come to the same ground. These are the points they share, and the voices that hold each one.
This is the third and final panel of the food-teaching: after the clear-minded and the restless, the food dear to the dull person, named through six plain marks of staleness and decay.
Across Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiŚaṅkara · Rāmānuja · Śrīdhara · MadhusūdanaIn Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and 2 others’ words
This verse completes the threefold picture of food that Krishna opened two verses earlier. Having named what the clear-minded and the restless love to eat, he now names what the person ruled by dullness loves: food gone cold past its watch, sapless, foul-smelling, cooked the day before, someone's leftovers, and food unfit even to be offered. Every acarya who comments here reads the six marks in close agreement, differing only in small examples.
Each mark stands as the near-exact opposite of a sattvic quality: stale against fresh, sapless against juicy, foul against agreeable. The food you tolerate without complaint carries the stamp of the quality that governs you.
Across Advaita, Bhakti, ViśiṣṭādvaitaMadhusūdana · Śrīdhara · RāmānujaIn Madhusūdana, Śrīdhara, and 1 others’ words
The deeper claim shared across the commentaries is that this food is the exact mirror of tamas itself. Where sattvic food is fresh, savory, and life-giving, this food is its precise opposite at every point: stale against fresh, sapless against juicy, foul against agreeable. The food someone genuinely craves is read as evidence of the quality that governs him from within.
Ramanuja turns the description into direct counsel: eating dull food makes dullness grow, so the seeker who wants his own good should eat only clear food, for the sake of growing that very clarity.
Across Viśiṣṭādvaita, BhaktiRāmānuja · ŚrīdharaIn Rāmānuja and Śrīdhara’s words
Because such food is held to feed the very darkness it expresses, the shared practical counsel is to keep it at a distance. Ramanuja states this most directly: eating dull food makes dullness grow, so anyone who wants his own good should eat only clear, sattvic food for the sake of growing that clarity.
The verse names no fruit for this food, unlike the restless food just before it, whose pain and disease were spelled out; the silence itself is read as marking how far the dull eater has already drifted from noticing either food or consequence.
Across AdvaitaMadhusūdanaIn Madhusūdana’s words
Unlike the verse just before it, which named the pain, grief, and disease that restless food brings, this verse names no fruit at all for tamasic food. Where the sources address this silence, they read it as pointing to how far gone the dull eater already is: he attends to neither the food nor its consequence, and simply falls upon what is in front of him.
Two of the commentaries drawn on here, Madhva and Abhinavagupta, leave no direct remark on this line; that honest gap is held open rather than filled in, a reminder that even a revered corpus has its silences.
Across Dvaita, Kashmir ŚaivaMadhva · AbhinavaguptaIn Madhva and Abhinavagupta’s words
Two of the six acaryas asked to comment here, Madhva and Abhinavagupta, have left no direct remark on this particular verse: Madhva's surviving Bhashya passes over the line in silence, and Abhinavagupta's extant note covers 17.7 through 17.10 as one block rather than commenting on this verse by itself. Both gaps are read as evidence of where each master chose to spend his commentarial attention, not as any implied disagreement with the verse.
This is the shared ground; it can be carried as it is. Below is where they differ.
Where they differthe divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita, in their fuller words
Ramanuja reads the list with a social precision the others do not add: 'leftover' means food left by ordinary people, not the sanctified remnant of a teacher's or elder's plate, which in his tradition carries the opposite value entirely. He then turns description into direct counsel, that eating dull food makes dullness grow, so the seeker who wants his own good should eat only clear food for the sake of clarity.
Dvaita, in their fuller words
No comment on this verse survives from Madhva; the honest report is silence, not a doctrine. Extending his broader system, one could reason that a soul's inherited nature (svabhava) already inclines it toward the very food that expresses its guna, so that craving stale or impure food would be read as evidence of that inherent constitution rather than a separate failing, but this is a conditional extension of his system, not his stated word.
Bhakti, in their fuller words
Where the tradition carries a devotional reading forward, food's ultimate resolution is not simply avoidance of the tamasic list but the transformation of any food, however plain, once it is first offered to the Lord and received back as grace; on such a reading, the six marks describe an ordinary meal, but a meal turned toward worship is judged by an entirely different measure. Ramanuja's own emphasis on eating for the growth of clarity leans this way without stating the devotional case in full.
A modern reading, in their fuller words
Read in a contemporary idiom, the verse names not a menu but a diagnostic: what a person reaches for without complaint or reflection, stale, flat, and unclean, discloses an inertia that has stopped noticing its own decline. The corrective the acaryas already state, choosing fresh and clean food for the sake of growing clarity, translates directly into ordinary practice, where attentiveness to what one eats becomes a small daily test of whether dullness or clarity is gaining ground.
A few questions to carry
These ask for understanding, not recall; each answer is settled by the commentary itself.
For a second sitting
Carry this with youwhat stays
Before you eat, notice what you are actually reaching for and why. If it is stale, flat, or simply convenient rather than nourishing, let that noticing itself be the practice: not guilt, but a small, steady preference for what is fresh and clear, meal by meal, as one of the plainest ways the mind can be tended.
Notice, at your next meal, what you reach for without a second thought, and let that noticing itself become a small return toward what is fresh, clean, and alive.
Read deeper
Everything a full study holds, folded below.
Word by word
All the commentary, woven together
The commentary, woven together
machine-assisted draft, pending review
Convergence
his verse completes the threefold picture of food that Krishna opened two verses earlier. Having named what the clear-minded and the restless love to eat, he now names what the person ruled by dullness loves: food gone cold past its watch, sapless, foul-smelling, cooked the day before, someone's leftovers, and food unfit even to be offered. Every acarya who comments here reads the six marks in close agreement, differing only in small examples.
Śaṅkarācārya · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
The deeper claim shared across the commentaries is that this food is the exact mirror of tamas itself. Where sattvic food is fresh, savory, and life-giving, this food is its precise opposite at every point: stale against fresh, sapless against juicy, foul against agreeable. The food someone genuinely craves is read as evidence of the quality that governs him from within.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Rāmānujācārya
Because such food is held to feed the very darkness it expresses, the shared practical counsel is to keep it at a distance. Ramanuja states this most directly: eating dull food makes dullness grow, so anyone who wants his own good should eat only clear, sattvic food for the sake of growing that clarity.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Unlike the verse just before it, which named the pain, grief, and disease that restless food brings, this verse names no fruit at all for tamasic food. Where the sources address this silence, they read it as pointing to how far gone the dull eater already is: he attends to neither the food nor its consequence, and simply falls upon what is in front of him.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Two of the six acaryas asked to comment here, Madhva and Abhinavagupta, have left no direct remark on this particular verse: Madhva's surviving Bhashya passes over the line in silence, and Abhinavagupta's extant note covers 17.7 through 17.10 as one block rather than commenting on this verse by itself. Both gaps are read as evidence of where each master chose to spend his commentarial attention, not as any implied disagreement with the verse.
Madhvācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
Shankara's own comment stays close to the lexicon: he glosses each of the six marks briefly and moves on to the threefold division of sacrifice that follows. Madhusudana takes the philology further, recording a live debate over whether yata-yama and gata-rasa name the same failure twice or two distinct ones (cooked rice gone cold, versus churned milk with its essence drawn out), and adding the structural observation that tamasic food opposes sattvic food both visibly and invisibly, exceeding even the rajasic opposition.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Viśiṣṭādvaita
Ramanuja reads the list with a social precision the others do not add: 'leftover' means food left by ordinary people, not the sanctified remnant of a teacher's or elder's plate, which in his tradition carries the opposite value entirely. He then turns description into direct counsel, that eating dull food makes dullness grow, so the seeker who wants his own good should eat only clear food for the sake of clarity.
Rāmānujācārya
Dvaita
No comment on this verse survives from Madhva; the honest report is silence, not a doctrine. Extending his broader system, one could reason that a soul's inherited nature (svabhava) already inclines it toward the very food that expresses its guna, so that craving stale or impure food would be read as evidence of that inherent constitution rather than a separate failing, but this is a conditional extension of his system, not his stated word.
Madhvācārya
Kashmir Śaiva
Abhinavagupta's surviving note treats 17.7 through 17.10 as one span and is stated explicitly to sit at 17.7, not here; nothing further on this verse's own list can honestly be attributed to him. A clearly conditional Kashmir Shaiva extension might read the craving for stale, lifeless food as a contraction of awareness curling tightly around its own most inert possibility, but the source itself does not say this.
Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Bhakti
Where the tradition carries a devotional reading forward, food's ultimate resolution is not simply avoidance of the tamasic list but the transformation of any food, however plain, once it is first offered to the Lord and received back as grace; on such a reading, the six marks describe an ordinary meal, but a meal turned toward worship is judged by an entirely different measure. Ramanuja's own emphasis on eating for the growth of clarity leans this way without stating the devotional case in full.
Rāmānujācārya
Modern
Read in a contemporary idiom, the verse names not a menu but a diagnostic: what a person reaches for without complaint or reflection, stale, flat, and unclean, discloses an inertia that has stopped noticing its own decline. The corrective the acaryas already state, choosing fresh and clean food for the sake of growing clarity, translates directly into ordinary practice, where attentiveness to what one eats becomes a small daily test of whether dullness or clarity is gaining ground.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī
A Seeker Asks
If tamasic food is described so precisely, why does the verse not also tell me exactly what harm it does, the way the previous verse did for restless food?
Madhusudana reads the silence itself as meaningful: the harm here is so plain by the food's own nature that it needs no statement, and unlike the restless eater, the dull eater is deluded enough that he looks at neither the food nor its consequence before falling upon it.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Ramanuja's answer is more practical than diagnostic: rather than dwelling on the harm, he tells you what to do about it, eat only clear food, because dull food itself makes dullness grow. The verse is less interested in cataloguing suffering than in giving you a reason to choose differently at the next meal.
Rāmānujācārya
Where the surviving comments are silent, as with Madhva and Abhinavagupta on this line, that silence should be read honestly as a gap in what has come down to us, not filled in with invented reasoning attributed to either master.
Madhvācārya · Ācārya Abhinavagupta
Contemplation
Before you eat, notice what you are actually reaching for and why. If it is stale, flat, or simply convenient rather than nourishing, let that noticing itself be the practice: not guilt, but a small, steady preference for what is fresh and clear, meal by meal, as one of the plainest ways the mind can be tended.
Sit with this · sonnet-5-authored
All the translations and commentary
Pull up a chair.
You have come to sit with this verse. When you are ready to hear the translators and the commentators in full, open a tradition in the doorways below, or add a voice by name above.
Also hear this verse, tradition by tradition.