Chapter 17: The Three Kinds of Faith

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Symbolic illustration for Chapter 17: The Three Kinds of Faith — Visual threshold · Chapter 17: The Three Kinds of Faith

The sixteenth chapter has barely closed when a question begins to stir in Arjuna. Most people never learn the full method the shastra lays down, and still they worship and offer yajna everywhere out of their own faith. Where does the devotion of people like that stand: sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic? The chapter opens on that question, and Krishna’s answer sets faith at the axis of a whole life. His answer skips the flat verdict of good or bad and goes deeper. Faith itself, he says, takes on the color of the qualities living inside us, and that color then spreads across everything we are.

The human being is made of faith

Krishna says that the faith of every creature follows the grain of its own nature, an inborn thing shaped by the tendencies a person has carried forward through action across many lives. That faith runs in three colors: sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic. Then he speaks the line that holds the life of the entire chapter.

सत्त्वानुरूपा सर्वस्य श्रद्धा भवति भारत ।
श्रद्धामयोऽयं पुरुषो यो यच्छ्रद्धः स एव सः ॥

The meaning: the faith of every person, Bharata, takes the shape of the nature within. A human being is made of faith; as the faith, so the person. Whatever you trust in your depths, you slowly become, and this is the invisible signature that keeps carving us into shape. So the sattvic temperament leans toward the gods. The rajasic mind turns to the yakshas and the rakshasas, the restless powers and the fierce ones. The tamasic pull runs toward the pretas and the bhutas, the spirits of the dead and the haunting things of the dark. Watch whom a person worships and the color inside him stands revealed, because each of us bows exactly where our faith draws us. And worship shapes where we are headed as surely as it shows who we are: those who adore the gods rise toward a bright, celestial state, those who court the yakshas and rakshasas are reborn into their kind, and those who feed the pretas and bhutas take on the very nature of what they serve.

Then Krishna turns to a harsher figure, the person who invents a terrifying penance no scripture ever asked for. Full of hypocrisy and ego, driven by craving, attachment, and the pride of raw power, such a one scourges and starves the body, tormenting the very elements that compose it. And because the divine is seated in every heart as its innermost self, this violence reaches the God within as well. These, Krishna says, are people of demoniac resolve, whatever holiness their ordeal pretends to.

Three colors of hunger

Here Krishna brings the whole matter down to the kitchen. Food, he says, is agreeable to each person according to the nature inside him, and it runs in the same three colors as everything else. He pauses on it for a reason. The mind is built out of what the body eats, and faith takes its shape from the mind, so a clean diet quietly clears the mind and steadies the faith that rests on it. Worship is something some people take up and others never do, while eating is common to all, which makes the plate the surest tell of the color within. Food that lengthens life, sharpens the mind, and builds strength, health, happiness, and warmth of heart, food that is juicy, smooth, nourishing, and pleasing, the milk and ghee and fruit and honest grain of an unhurried table, is sattvic. Food that runs too bitter, too sour, too salty, searing hot, too sharp, dry, and burning, the kind that marches you straight toward pain, grief, and sickness, is rajasic. And food half-cooked, drained of taste, stale, foul-smelling, left over from another’s plate, or impure by its very making is tamasic. Even the plate in front of you tells tales on the color within.

The three forms of yajna, tapas, and charity

Then he lays the same measure against our grander acts. One yajna, one tapas, one act of giving, and a turn of intention bends each of them in three different directions. Krishna wants us to look past the outer shell of an act and find the intent seated inside it. A yajna performed with the hunger for its fruit set down, taken up in the settled conviction that it simply must be done, and carried out by the method the scripture prescribes, is sattvic. Performed for display, or out of appetite for its fruit, it turns rajasic. And performed with no regard for the method, with no food offered and no Brahmins fed, without the sacred chant, without dakshina for the priests, and without faith, it sinks to tamasic.

Tapas Krishna divides across three seats. The tapas of the body: honoring the gods, the twice-born, the guru, and the wise, along with purity, straightforwardness, brahmacharya, and doing no harm. The tapas of speech: words that stir no one’s distress, words true, kind, and useful, kept company by the study of scripture and the quiet repeating of the divine name. The tapas of the mind: an inward cheerfulness, a settled gentleness, the silence of a mind resting on God, command over oneself, and a clean purity of feeling. Tapas, then, reaches well past the scorching of the body. It disciplines the tongue and the mind too, and the hardest tapas of all is often exactly that, sweet speech and a settled mind. When these three are practiced with a supreme faith and no appetite for reward, they are sattvic. When they are staged for honor, respect, and applause, they turn rajasic, and their reward is as shaky and short-lived as the motive behind it. And when they become self-torture undertaken out of blind stubbornness, or a weapon aimed at another’s harm, they are tamasic.

Now the turn of giving. Its cleanest form Krishna sets down in these words.

दातव्यमिति यद्दानं दीयतेऽनुपकारिणे ।
देशे काले च पात्रे च तद्दानं सात्त्विकं स्मृतम् ॥

The meaning: the gift given in the single conviction that giving is a duty, expecting no favor in return, offered in the right place, at the right time, to a worthy recipient, is the sattvic gift, Gita 17.20. Right place and right time are wherever and whenever the gift is truly needed, food and water carried into a famine, and the worthy recipient is the one whose need is real, the hungry, the sick, the frightened, the genuinely learned who ask nothing for themselves. The gift handed over grudgingly, or with an eye on repayment and reward, is rajasic. And the gift thrown down at the wrong place, at the wrong time, into unworthy hands, stripped of respect and laced with contempt, is tamasic. The giving hand looks the same in all three. The feeling behind it lifts the gift high or drops it low.

Om tat sat

One thing comes clear at this point. Food, yajna, tapas, and giving can all wear the same face, while the feeling behind them steers them toward three separate destinations. The same plate, the same temple, the same outstretched hand, and the faith inside decides whether the act will raise you or sink you. Krishna keeps walking us back from the outer performance to the feeling within.

At the end he hands over a formula that ties every good act back to Brahman: Om tat sat, the threefold name of the Absolute, who is truth, awareness, and bliss. From that One, at the first dawn of creation, came the priests, the Vedas, and the very rites of sacrifice. Each syllable does its own work. With “Om” every yajna, gift, and tapas begins, and the utterance of that name quietly mends whatever was flawed in the act. “Tat” is spoken by those who seek liberation, in the knowledge that all of this belongs to God and nothing to them, and so it releases the craving for any fruit. And “sat” names three things at once: what is real and enduring, what is good and noble, and any praiseworthy deed the scripture honors. Steadiness in yajna, tapas, and giving is called sat, and so is any act done purely for God’s sake.

Beneath all of it runs a single foundation. Whatever is done without faith is asat, and asat is of no use here and of no use hereafter. An oblation poured, a gift given, a penance borne, any good work at all, if faith is absent it comes to nothing. Faith is the invisible thread that gives every act its meaning, and as the faith, so the life.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita

Verse by verse

All 28 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/17/1/. Read the chapter above first, then come down to the source.

17.1ये शास्त्रविधिमुत्सृज्य यजन्ते श्रद्धयान्विताः

अर्जुन उवाच

ये शास्त्रविधिमुत्सृज्य यजन्ते श्रद्धयान्विताः ।
तेषां निष्ठा तु का कृष्ण सत्त्वमाहो रजस्तमः ॥1॥

ye śāstravidhim utsṛjya yajante śraddhayānvitāḥ |
teṣāṃ niṣṭhā tu kā kṛṣṇa sattvam āho rajas tamaḥ

ये: जो लोग
शास्त्रविधिम्: शास्त्र की विधि को
उत्सृज्य: छोड़कर
यजन्ते: यजन करते हैं
श्रद्धया: श्रद्धा से
अन्विताः: युक्त
तेषाम्: उनकी
निष्ठा: निष्ठा
तु: तो
का: कौन सी
कृष्ण: हे कृष्ण
सत्त्वम्: सत्त्व
आहो: अथवा
रजः: रज
तमः: तम

Prose order: कृष्ण, ये शास्त्रविधिम् उत्सृज्य श्रद्धया अन्विताः यजन्ते, तेषाम् निष्ठा तु का, सत्त्वम् आहो रजः तमः।

kṛṣṇa, ye śāstravidhim utsṛjya śraddhayā anvitāḥ yajante, teṣām niṣṭhā tu kā, sattvam āho rajaḥ tamaḥ|

Krishna, those who set aside the injunctions of the scriptures and yet worship with faith, what is their standing? Is it sattva, rajas, or tamas?