आत्मसम्भाविताः स्तब्धा धनमानमदान्विताः।यजन्ते नामयज्ञैस्ते दम्भेनाविधिपूर्वकम्॥
ātma-sambhāvitāḥ stabdhā dhana-māna-madānvitāḥyajante nāma-yajñais te dambhenāvidhi-pūrvakam
Word by word
The verse says
Full of themselves, stiff-necked, drunk on money and the standing it buys, they make offerings that are offerings in name only - for show, and in no proper way.
In plain words
Stabdha - stiff. Not cruel, not greedy. Stiff.
It describes a person who cannot be corrected. Not because they argue, but because nothing gets in.
And what they are doing is religion, done well enough to look right. This is not a description of somebody outside the temple. It is a description of somebody inside it.
Where you've felt this · in community
A trust in your town funds a new hall and the family's name goes on the front in large letters. It is a good hall and people use it every week. At the opening the speeches run forty minutes and three of them are about the family. The old woman who cleans the floor there is not introduced to anybody. The hall is real and people are better off for it. The opening was about something else.
Going deeper
Stiffness is the quality named here, and of all the faults in this chapter it is the one that makes the others permanent.
Stabdha means rigid, unbending. The word is physical. It describes a person nothing can reach - not an arguer, who at least has to hear the argument, but someone for whom the question simply never arrives.
Put that beside the religious practice in the same verse and you see why the two belong together. Ritual done for show is not the real problem; most people's practice is mixed. The problem is a practice that can never be examined, because the examining would have to get in.
And it points at the one thing that actually protects you from this chapter. Not goodness. Softness, in the narrow sense of still being reachable. A person who can be told something is never fully in the state described here, however badly they are behaving.