The Three Gunas

The gunas, literally strands or cords, are the three constituents of prakriti in Samkhya, present in every material thing in differing proportions. They are not qualities that things possess; they are what things are made of, and their shifting proportions account both for the variety of the world and for the changing states of a person from hour to hour.

Sattva is the strand of clarity, lightness, intelligence and equilibrium. It is what makes things knowable and the mind capable of knowing them, and it is called the highest of the three because it is the condition nearest to liberation. Both Samkhya and the Gita insist, however, that sattva binds as surely as the others, by attachment to happiness and to knowledge, a point easy to miss and much emphasised in the commentaries.

Rajas is the strand of activity, passion and motion: the principle of change, desire and effort, the source of restlessness, and what disturbs the original equilibrium and so sets the whole evolution of the world going.

Tamas is the strand of heaviness, inertia, obscuration and darkness. It accounts for solidity and concealment, and in a person for dullness, sleep, confusion and delusion.

The Bhagavad Gita's fourteenth chapter gives the best-known exposition, taking the three in turn and describing how each binds: sattva by attachment to happiness and knowledge, rajas by attachment to action, tamas by heedlessness and sloth. Its seventeenth and eighteenth chapters then run the classification through faith, food, sacrifice, austerity, giving, knowledge, action, agent, intellect and resolve, producing three kinds of each. The scheme became one of the most widely diffused analytical tools in Indian culture, used in Ayurveda, in aesthetic theory, in the classification of deities, foods and temperaments, and in ordinary moral vocabulary, where the three adjectives remain current in modern Indian languages.

Two cautions are standard. The gunas are strands of nature and not moral categories, and the Gita's stated goal is to become trigunatita, beyond all three, rather than to maximise sattva, though sattva is the condition from which that transcendence is approached, so the practical advice and the final goal point in different directions. And the scheme has been used to rank persons as well as states, including in defence of caste hierarchy. That usage has been contested within Hindu thought, and reformers have pointed out that the Gita applies the classification to actions and dispositions rather than to birth, and that its own statement about the origin of the four classes ties them to quality and activity rather than to descent.

Beyond its philosophical role in Samkhya and the Gita's ethical teaching, the guna scheme became the organizing principle of Ayurvedic dietetics and mental classification, giving the three strands a concrete daily application most Hindus encounter well before, or entirely apart from, any philosophical instruction.

Ayurvedic and yogic dietary teaching sorts foods into the three gunas: sattvic foods, fresh, mild, easily digested, plant-based foods including fruits and whole grains, are held to promote clarity and calm; rajasic foods, spicy, stimulating, bitter or sour foods including onion, garlic and caffeine, are held to promote restlessness; and tamasic foods, stale, overcooked, processed foods and alcohol, are held to promote dullness and inertia. This dietary scheme extends beyond food to activity and environment, so a practitioner is instructed to cultivate sattvic surroundings as a technique for supporting the mental clarity meditation requires, treating diet as continuous with spiritual discipline.

The scheme is also applied psychologically, particularly in the Charaka Samhita, which classifies mental temperament (manas prakriti) by the same three gunas, describing sattvic personalities as calm and self-controlled, rajasic personalities as ambitious and prone to anger, and tamasic personalities as dull and resistant to learning, a typology still used in Ayurvedic counseling and yoga therapy to tailor practice to an individual's dominant guna, a use of ancient metaphysical categories for present-day diagnostic purposes.