यजन्ते सात्त्विका देवान्यक्षरक्षांसि राजसाः।प्रेतान्भूतगणांश्चान्ये यजन्ते तामसा जनाः॥
yajante sāttvikā devān yakṣa-rakṣānsi rājasāḥpretān bhūta-gaṇānś cānye yajante tāmasā janāḥ
Word by word
The verse says
Those in clarity make offerings to the bright powers. The driven offer to powers of wealth and force. The dark ones offer to ghosts and the crowd of spirits.
In plain words
A list that can be read badly, so read it slowly.
This is not a ranking of religions. It is a claim about what people go to the unseen for.
The bright powers, in the old picture, keep the world in order - rain, fire, speech. The second group deal in wealth and force. The third are the restless. What you approach tells you what you came for.
Where you've felt this · in community
Three people arrive at the same small shrine on the same morning. One has brought flowers, sits a while, and leaves without asking for anything in particular. One wants a court case to go his way. One has come because something frightened him in the night. Nobody there is doing anything wrong. But three different things walked in the door, and the shrine is not what differs.
Going deeper
What a person goes to the unseen for is being sorted here, not which name they use for it.
The three sets of beings in the old cosmology work as a shorthand. One group maintains the world and asks nothing dramatic. One deals in power and getting. One is simply restless and unquiet. Approaching each of them means wanting a different thing.
This gets misread as a verdict on whose religion is better, and that reading will not hold. The same god can be approached in all three ways on the same morning, by three people standing in the same queue. The difference is in the asking.
So the use of it is not to grade anybody else. It is the question of what you reach for the unseen about. For most people, honestly answered, it is a list of things they want to go well - which is not shameful, and is also not the whole of what is on offer.