ये शास्त्रविधिमुत्सृज्य यजन्ते श्रद्धयाऽन्विताः।तेषां निष्ठा तु का कृष्ण सत्त्वमाहो रजस्तमः॥
ye śāstra-vidhim utsṛjya yajante śraddhayānvitāḥteṣāṃ niṣṭhā tu kā kṛṣṇa sattvam āho rajas tamaḥ
Word by word
The verse says
What about people who set the rules of scripture aside and still worship, and do it with real faith? Where do they stand, Krishna - in clarity, in drive, or in darkness?
In plain words
Arjuna has been listening, and he has spotted the gap.
He has just been told to let the texts be his measure. But he knows people who have never opened one and are plainly sincere. His grandmother, probably. Everybody has one.
So the question is not academic. Where do the sincere and unschooled stand? It is a good question, and it gets a long answer.
Where you've felt this · in study
Ramesh, who is fifty-four, joins an evening class and asks the question everybody else was too embarrassed to ask. He has no training and the question is not sophisticated. It is also the exact thing three other people in the room had not understood. The teacher answers it and the whole class moves on together. Not knowing the vocabulary is the reason he was able to ask.
Going deeper
Asking what becomes of the sincere person who never learned the rules is the best question in the second half of this book.
Śraddhā is the word at the centre of it. It is usually translated as faith, which in English suggests believing things without evidence. That is not what it means. It means what you actually trust, what you lean your weight on, what you are loyal to before you have reasoned about it.
Everybody has that, including people who would deny having any religion at all. The question is never whether you have it. It is what it is pointed at.
That is why the answer runs long. Sincerity turns out to be real, and also not enough on its own, and you need both halves of that or you will get this wrong in one direction or the other.