What you receive was given for a return, and to keep it all for yourself is theft.

Viśiṣṭādvaita

These commentators read the enjoyments not as ends in themselves but as resources for further worship. The one who pursues liberation does not desire enjoyments to fill his belly; he desires them so that each gift becomes the means of the next act of worship. They press a careful definition of theft itself: theft is taking what was set apart for another's purpose and treating it as one's own, nourishing oneself with it. One source draws an analogy of kings who grant land to those who serve them in return for a share of the produce; tenants who pay no tax are liable to punishment, just as one who takes the gods' gifts and renders nothing is. Distinctively, these sources hold that the gods themselves have the Lord as their inner self, so worship offered to them reaches the Lord. The same source notes that the gods give fruit only in order to receive the offering, so failing to offer is failing to repay a giver who gave for that very return.

Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika

Śuddhādvaita

These commentators read the whole exchange as the Lord's order. The enjoyments are given so they may serve Bhagavan; the food the gods arrange through rain is meant for the service of the Lord. To take and not return is therefore theft against the order set up for the Lord's own enjoyment, indeed theft from the Supreme Person himself. One source frames the worshipper's whole life as a circuit of giving and receiving from the Lord and his hosts, and breaking that circuit by enjoying for oneself alone is the theft. The other adds that if the gods are the ones who give food, the very purpose of offering sacrifice to them is to keep this circuit, set up for the Lord's enjoyment, unbroken.

Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama

Bhakti

These devotional commentators keep the plain ritual sense and stress the failure to offer through the five great sacrifices before eating. One sharpens the penalty vividly: such a person, like a thief deserving punishment from a king, deserves punishment from Yama, the lord of death, and is unworthy of the goals of human life; the god could take those very things back and nourish himself with them. The Marathi commentator expands the verse into a long warning placed in the mouth of Brahma: one who, drunk on the wealth and glory the gods have given, abandons his own religious duty and gives himself wholly to pleasure will lose all that glory, be deprived of his possessions, and be enveloped by sins and miseries; as a fish dies the moment it leaves water, one who leaves his own dharma is utterly destroyed, so never abandon your duty and never let the senses run unruly.

Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar

Kashmir Shaivism

This commentator reads the verse inwardly, as a teaching about the senses rather than only the outer gods. The senses, gladdened by sacrifice, steady the mind on whatever it meditates upon, and through memory, intention, and meditation they present their objects. If one does not give the objects to the very senses for their proper enjoyment, that itself is theftlike behavior, a kind of acting under disguise, recalling the earlier verse that calls such a person one of deluded conduct. So the practitioner who seeks perfection or release should serve the enjoyments as they arise, but with a precise aim: their fruit is merely the stilling of the senses' craving, not indulgence.

Ācārya Abhinavagupta

Modern

These modern commentators widen or qualify the meaning. One reads the gods of verses 11 and 12 as the whole creation of God, so that the service of all created beings is itself the service of the gods and itself the sacrifice. Another places the verse in a cosmological frame: after Brahma created the worlds and worried how they would be sustained, the Lord created the cycle of sacrifices for mutual protection of gods and humans, and yajna here means all the prescribed duties, which must be kept going for the maintenance of society; this same source traces how animal sacrifice gave way to sacrifice of wealth and finally to sacrifice by prayer and by knowledge as the highest. A third insists firmly that the desired enjoyment here cannot mean objects sought for one's own pleasure, since the previous verse spoke of the supreme welfare and while desire for enjoyment remains that welfare can never come; the enjoyment means the rightful supply of materials by which one's prescribed duties can be carried out, and the thief is one who has cut himself off from the cosmic cycle of giving and become a mere extractor.

Mahatma Gandhi · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas