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The Three Qualities of Nature
The three gunas, sattva, rajas and tamas, are the qualities that, in Samkhya philosophy and in the Bhagavad Gita, compose all of material nature (prakriti) in shifting proportion. Sattva is clarity, harmony and balance; rajas is activity, passion and agitation; tamas is inertia, dullness and obscurity, and everything in the manifest world is a mixture of the three.
The doctrine is a cornerstone of the Samkhya analysis of reality and runs through Hindu thought, ethics and psychology: foods, actions, states of mind and stages of life are all classified by their predominant guna.
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