Chapter 14
Gunatraya Vibhaga Yoga
Yoga through Understanding the Three Modes of Material Nature · 27 verses
This chapter is traditionally treasured as the Gita's account of the three gunas, the strands of nature, and the title means the yoga of dividing them. Guna means a basic quality of prakriti, which is nature, the material ground of the world.
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Krishna says he places a seed into nature, the womb of all beings, so every birth is the joint work of nature and the Lord. Three gunas run through everything: sattva, which is clarity and calm; rajas, which is restless drive and craving; and tamas, which is dullness and delusion. Each binds the self that wears a body, though the self in its own nature stays untouched. Krishna gives the marks of each guna, how each shapes action, and where each carries a person at death. He then describes the one who has crossed beyond all three. Such a person stays even in pleasure and pain, in praise and blame, watching nature move without being pulled in. This is steadiness, not coldness. The means to cross over is unswerving devotion to Krishna. The chapter closes by naming Krishna as the ground of Brahman, the deathless, and unbroken happiness. On what reaching that goal finally is, whether full identity with the supreme or an abiding likeness near a personal Lord, the schools genuinely differ; Advaita Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita, Dvaita, Shuddhadvaita, and Bhakti each read it in their own way.
- 1The teaching returns, not because it is new, but because it must be heard again to be truly known.
- 2Taking refuge in this knowledge, you come to share the Lord's own nature, untouched by the making and unmaking of worlds.
- 3One womb, one seed, one hand behind every birth in the world.
- 4Every form that is ever born has the same two parents: the great Brahman as womb, Krishna as the seed-giving father.
- 5Three strands, born of Nature, tie the unchanging self fast to the body it lives in.
- 6The purest strand of nature still ties a knot, through your liking for its own light and peace.
- 7Rajas is passion in its very substance, and it binds not through the deed but through the wanting carried into it.
- 8Tamas is born of ignorance and darkens the seer; it needs no craving to bind you, only a fog you have not yet cleared.
- 9Each strand of your nature ties you to a different rope, and the rope you feel pulling is the one now strongest.
- 10No quality rules alone; each rises only by pressing the other two down.
- 11A clear light at every gate of the body is how you know sattva has risen in you.
- 12Five signs tell you passion has taken the wheel: greed that grows on being fed, and a restlessness that will not sit still.
- 13Four marks tell you when darkness, not stillness, has taken the wheel.
- 14Dying while clarity is risen, the embodied self reaches the spotless worlds of those who know the highest.
- 15Death under passion returns you to human striving; death under dullness opens a door the tradition itself is honest about not fully describing here.
- 16The fruit always wears the face of the quality that produced it.
- 17Each strand of your nature ripens into its own fruit: sattva into seeing, rajas into wanting, tamas into darkness.
- 18Three qualities carry three lives to three different places, and even the best of them still ends in return.
- 19Look closely enough, and no doer remains but the three qualities of nature, and you, watching.
- 20Cross the three strands of nature, and the deathless is already yours, not a reward deferred to death.
- 21Arjuna asks for the living portrait of the one who has crossed beyond the three qualities.
- 22He does not hate what rises in him, nor long for what has gone.
- 23He sits like one indifferent, unshaken, because he sees that the doing was never his.
- 24The mark of the one beyond the three strands: the same in pain and pleasure, resting in himself.
- 25Even under honor and its opposite, even toward friend and foe, he starts nothing more for gain.
- 26One who serves without ever straying is carried past the three gunas, to the very threshold of Brahman.
- 27Krishna names himself the ground in which Brahman itself stands.