Bhagavad Gita 14.15 is Chapter 14, Verse 15, in Gunatraya Vibhaga Yoga (The Three Gunas). Below are the Sanskrit text, a transliteration, a plain-English translation and an explanation.
rajasi pralayaṁ gatvā karma-saṅgiṣu jāyate tathā pralīnas tamasi mūḍha-yoniṣu jāyate
"Meeting death in rajas, one is born among those attached to action; likewise dying in tamas, one is born in the wombs of the deluded."
What This Means:
Dying in a rajasic state (restless, driven), you're reborn among action-obsessed people. Dying in a tamasic state (dull, confused), you're reborn in wombs of ignorance, perhaps as animals or in degraded human circumstances.
Going Deeper:
'Rajasi pralayam gatvā karma-saṅgiṣu jāyate', dying in rajas, reborn among the action-attached (busy, ambitious families/circumstances). 'Tamasi pralīnaḥ mūḍha-yoniṣu jāyate', dissolved in tamas, born in deluded wombs. 'Mūḍha-yoni' suggests animal births or deeply ignorant human conditions. Like attracts like, death state determines rebirth environment.
How To Apply This:
This teaching motivates conscious living. Every day you strengthen certain tendencies. Are you cultivating clarity or dullness? The habits you build now shape not just this life but what follows.
Where this verse sits
Verse 15 completes the pair begun in 14.14. Having said that death in sattva leads to the pure worlds of the wise, Krishna gives the other two cases: death in rajas and death in tamas. Verse 18 then gathers all three into one line, upward, middle, downward, and the chapter turns to how the gunas are crossed altogether, ending in 14.26 and 14.27 with devotion and with Krishna as the ground of Brahman.
What the words say
Rajasi pralayam gatva, 'having gone to dissolution in rajas', means dying while restlessness and craving are uppermost; karma-sangishu jayate, one is born among those attached to action, which Shankara reads as a human birth among the busy and ambitious. Tamasi pralinah, 'dissolved in tamas', is death in dullness and confusion; mudha-yonishu jayate, one is born in the wombs of the deluded, which the commentators take to include animal births and human lives of deep ignorance. The principle is continuity: the condition in which a life ends is the condition into which the next begins.
A common misreading
The verse can sound like a threat, but the chapter is not fatalist. 14.10 has already said that each guna rises by overcoming the others, which means the balance moves and can be moved. A person is not fixed in tamas; tamas is a state that can be replaced, and the Gita's advice throughout is to cultivate sattva by what one eats, does and attends to, and then to go beyond even that. The verse describes momentum, not a sentence. Its practical force is on the present: the state you practise is the state you are likely to die in.
Key Sanskrit Terms: