Chapter 14: The Three Gunas

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Symbolic illustration for Chapter 14: The Three Gunas — Visual threshold · Chapter 14: The Three Gunas

Krishna settles in to say the thing once more, the highest wisdom there is, the knowing that carried the great sages all the way to perfection and cut them loose from this world of birth and death. Whoever makes this wisdom wholly their own, he says, passes into his own being; when creation dawns again they are not reborn, and when the whole universe folds back into the great dissolution, the Pralaya, they are not shaken. Here is the ground he wants Arjuna to stand on. Every human being is tied down by three ropes. The ropes are called gunas: sattva, rajas, and tamas. Learn to recognize all three, and then walk clean past all three. That is the whole heart of this chapter.

The three ropes that bind everyone

Krishna opens with a picture worth holding still for. My primordial nature is the great womb, he says, and into it I lay the seed of all life. Every being that has ever taken form, in every species there is, springs from that union. Nature is the mother of them all; I am the father who plants the seed. And out of this same nature rise three strands, the three gunas, and those three are what bind the imperishable self seated in the body.

सत्त्वं रजस्तम इति गुणाः प्रकृतिसम्भवाः ।
निबध्नन्ति महाबाहो देहे देहिनमव्ययम् ॥
Sattva, rajas, and tamas, these three gunas are born of nature, Arjuna, and they bind the imperishable atman that dwells in the body. (Gita 14.5)

Pause on that. The self is imperishable. It can never truly be caught, and still it lets itself be bound, the way a free bird sits quiet while a silk thread is looped around its foot. The rope is really the self’s own habit of calling the body its own, of taking the body’s pleasures and losses for its own. That habit reaches back further than memory, so far that the self forgets it was ever free. All three ropes run through every one of us. The only live question is which one has the tightest grip on you at this hour.

Each guna wears its own color

Sattva is clear and weightless, like daylight. When it rises in you, the mind grows quiet, judgment wakes, understanding turns clean and sharp. Sorrow and restlessness lift away, the senses settle and come alive, and the mind loosens its hold on the world and leans toward the eternal. Krishna adds a warning. This bright, gentle guna binds too. It binds by gluing you to the sweetness of its own happiness and the pleasure of its own knowing, so that you sink into that comfort and stop climbing.

Rajas is the fire inside, all craving and attachment. It is born of thirst and clinging, and it breeds fresh thirst and clinging in turn, seed and tree each making the other. When it climbs in you, restlessness comes, greed comes, and the itch to be harnessed to one task after another. Rajas binds by chaining you to your actions and to the fruit you want from them, and so it keeps you turning on the wheel of birth and death.

And tamas is darkness, the child of ignorance. When it settles over a person, sloth moves in, and heavy sleep, and carelessness, and a fog drops over the mind until it can no longer tell true from false. Tamas is the great deluder of everyone who takes the body for the self, and it binds through negligence, laziness, and sleep.

The three are always wrestling for the top. When sattva surges, it holds rajas and tamas down, and light and calm flood the body. When rajas surges, it holds the other two down, and greed and the hunger to act take over. When tamas surges, it buries both, and dullness and confusion spread. One rides highest, then another, the whole of your life long.

Which guna is rising

Krishna hands over the signs, so you can read yourself. When a soft light of understanding begins spilling out through every gate of the body, through every sense, sattva is on the rise. When greed stirs, and hurry, and a thirst for pleasure, and the pull to begin one fresh undertaking after another, that is rajas climbing. When everything inside turns murky and sluggish and heedless and dazed, and you cannot rouse yourself to do what you ought, tamas has spread over you.

And the guna that holds you at the hour you leave the body, he says, sets the whole road ahead. Die while sattva reigns, and you rise to the stainless worlds of light that reward people of noble deeds. Die while rajas reigns, and you come back among people driven by action, born human once more. Die sunk in tamas, and you fall into the dull wombs of senseless creatures, the insects and the beasts.

There is a rule underneath all of this. Every deed leaves a fruit that tastes of the guna that drove it. A clean, selfless deed ripens into calm, clear seeing, and a loosening of desire. A deed done in the heat of rajas, done for its reward, ripens into pain. A deed done in the dark of tamas, blind and heedless, ripens into deeper ignorance. So the harvest is plain: sattva grows knowledge, rajas grows greed, and tamas grows heedlessness and ignorance.

And across a whole life the direction holds. Those who live steadied in sattva climb toward the higher worlds. Those settled in rajas hold to the middle, reborn here among men. Those steeped in tamas sink, down into the lowest wombs, and lower still into the dark hells that go by names like Raurava and Kumbhipaka.

Going past all three

So the path has two moves. First climb into sattva, shaking off rajas and tamas. Then let go of even sattva. It is a bright rope, a golden one, and a golden rope holds you just as fast. Beyond all three lies open ground. Krishna names the turning. The day a seeker truly sees that every bit of doing in the world is only the gunas playing among themselves, and knows himself as something standing clear beyond them, that day he passes into Krishna’s own being. And then comes the line that is the lamp of this chapter.

गुणानेतानतीत्य त्रीन्देही देहसमुद्भवान् ।
जन्ममृत्युजरादुःखैर्विमुक्तोऽमृतमश्नुते ॥
When the embodied soul crosses beyond these three gunas, the very gunas that give rise to the body, then, freed from birth, death, old age, and sorrow, it tastes the nectar of immortality. (Gita 14.20)

Hearing this, a question rises in Arjuna. Lord, he asks, the one who has gone past these three gunas, how would we know him? How does he live, and how does he make the crossing?

Krishna answers gently. Such a person watches sattva’s light, rajas’s stir, and tamas’s fog arrive, and holds no grudge against them; watches them leave, and sends up no plea for their return. He sits like an onlooker with nothing at stake, knowing it is only gunas moving among gunas, and he himself never wavers. He is at home in his own self, and that is what keeps him level. Pleasure and pain weigh the same to him. A lump of clay, a stone, a bar of gold, all one. Friend and enemy, honor and insult, blame and praise, the welcome and the unwelcome, he meets them all with the same steady mind. And he has set down the whole notion that he is the doer of anything he does. That, Krishna says, is the mark of the one who has crossed beyond the gunas.

Then Krishna holds out the plain road, the one Arjuna was hoping for. Whoever serves me with devotion that never wavers and never divides, love with no other motive folded into it, crosses clean past these three gunas and grows fit to become Brahman. For, he says, I am the ground it all rests on. That Brahman, that deathless and unchanging state, that eternal dharma, that one unbroken joy, the foundation under every one of them is me.

Put the whole chapter in a single breath and it comes to this. Learn the three ropes inside you, sattva, rajas, and tamas, then become the clear-eyed witness of their coming and going. That is crossing beyond the gunas. That is freedom.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita

Verse by verse

All 27 verses of this chapter: Devanagari, Roman transliteration, word by word, prose order, and a plain rendering. Every verse has its own link, such as lulla.net/en/bhagwad-gita/14/1/. Read the chapter above first, then come down to the source.

14.1परं भूयः प्रवक्ष्यामि ज्ञानानां ज्ञानमुत्तमम्

श्रीभगवानुवाच

परं भूयः प्रवक्ष्यामि ज्ञानानां ज्ञानमुत्तमम् ।
यज्ज्ञात्वा मुनयः सर्वे परां सिद्धिमितो गताः ॥1॥

paraṃ bhūyaḥ pravakṣyāmi jñānānāṃ jñānam uttamam |
yaj jñātvā munayaḥ sarve parāṃ siddhim ito gatāḥ

परम्: परम, श्रेष्ठ
भूयः: फिर से
प्रवक्ष्यामि: मैं कहूँगा
ज्ञानानाम्: सब ज्ञानों में
ज्ञानम्: ज्ञान
उत्तमम्: उत्तम
यत्: जिसको
ज्ञात्वा: जानकर
मुनयः: मुनि
सर्वे: सब
पराम्: परम
सिद्धिम्: सिद्धि को
इतः: इस संसार से
गताः: प्राप्त हुए

Prose order: ज्ञानानाम् उत्तमम् परम् ज्ञानम् भूयः प्रवक्ष्यामि, यत् ज्ञात्वा सर्वे मुनयः इतः पराम् सिद्धिम् गताः।

jñānānām uttamam param jñānam bhūyaḥ pravakṣyāmi, yat jñātvā sarve munayaḥ itaḥ parām siddhim gatāḥ|

I will speak again of that supreme knowledge, the best of all knowledge, by knowing which all the sages have passed from this world to the highest perfection.