Here the Gita hands over one of its most useful analytical tools: the three gunas, the strands of material nature that bind the embodied soul (14.5). Sattva — pure, luminous — binds through attachment to happiness and knowledge (14.6); rajas — passion, born of craving — binds through compulsive action (14.7); tamas — born of ignorance — binds through negligence, laziness, and sleep (14.8). They are not fixed types but rotating weather: sometimes one prevails over the others (14.10), and the chapter gives field-marks for noticing which is ascendant — clarity at the body's gates for sattva (14.11), greed and restless undertaking for rajas (14.12), darkness and delusion for tamas (14.13).
The teaching's aim is not to perfect one's sattva but to see past all three: when the seer perceives no doer other than the gunas and knows what stands beyond them, they attain the divine nature (14.19), freed from birth, death, old age, and sorrow (14.20). Asked how such a person looks, Krishna describes someone who neither hates nor craves the gunas' comings and goings, equal in praise and blame, honour and dishonour (14.22–25) — a transcendence reached, he adds, through unwavering devotion (14.26).
Key verses
Sattva, rajas, and tamas — these three gunas born of material nature bind the imperishable soul to the body, O mighty-armed one.
When the embodied soul transcends these three gunas that are the source of the body, it is freed from birth, death, old age, and sorrow, and attains immortality.
One who serves me with unwavering devotion, transcending these three gunas, becomes fit to realize Brahman.
Read Chapter 14 in full
Every verse with translation, word meanings, and commentary — free.
Léelo gratis en la appPregunta a las tradiciones
Una pregunta. Cinco tradiciones responden.
2 preguntas cada 24 horas sin cuenta.