The Three Modes of Nature and Their Transcendence

VIII

निस्त्रैगुण्यो भवार्जुन

nistraiguṇyo bhavārjuna

The three qualities are a triple power which by their interaction determine the character and disposition and through that and its various motions the actions of the natural man. But this triple power is at the same time a triple cord of bondage.

Very early in the Gita, while Arjuna is still asking only how he may escape the guilt of a terrible battle, the Teacher lets fall a phrase whose full meaning will not be unfolded until the fourteenth chapter and will not be completed until the last. The ritual religion of the Veda, he says, has for its field the action of the three gunas, the whole round of desire and enjoyment and reward; “but do thou become free from the triple guna, O Arjuna.” It is spoken almost in passing, one clause in a verse about the Vedic ritualists; and yet it contains in germ the entire aim of the teaching.

त्रैगुण्यविषया वेदा निस्त्रैगुण्यो भवार्जुन ।निर्द्वन्द्वो नित्यसत्त्वस्थो निर्योगक्षेम आत्मवान् ॥

traiguṇyaviṣayā vedā nistraiguṇyo bhavārjunanirdvandvo nityasattvastho niryogakṣema ātmavān

What are these three, from which the soul must become free? Tamas, rajas and sattwa, inertia, passion and light: the three modes, guṇa, in which the whole lower Nature casts all her workings. The old word guṇa means also a strand, a thread of a cord; and the image is apt, for these three are at once the qualities of which our nature is woven and the cord by which the embodied soul is bound. The Gita’s treatment of them is not a cold classification of temperaments, still less a moral scale in which the good man climbs from the dark mode to the bright one and rests there content. It is a spiritual psychology whose whole purpose is to set us free: to show us these modes working in every movement of body and life and mind, to show how even the brightest of them binds, how the lowest is to be mastered by the highest, and how the highest itself must at last be exceeded by the soul that rises into the being and nature of the Divine. Three terms, and a fourth above them which is not a fourth mode but their Lord and their source: that is the shape of this teaching.

guṇa

The Weave of Quality

The modes of Nature, Sri Aurobindo insists, are qualitative in their essence, and that is why they are called gunas, qualities. Behind every quantitative arrangement of matter and energy there is an ideative power which disposes things according to the quality of their being; and in life and mind quality appears openly as the primary power, while mere amount of force becomes a secondary thing. The Gita therefore describes the three modes almost entirely by their psychological action in man, and it is on this side that we can best grasp them.

On their psychological side the three qualities may be defined, tamas as Nature’s power of nescience, rajas as her power of active seeking ignorance enlightened by desire and impulsion, sattwa as her power of possessing and harmonising knowledge.

Nescience, seeking ignorance, possessing knowledge: here is the whole range of our natural consciousness laid out in three terms. Tamas is the inertia that suffers every shock without any mastering response, the dullness and heaviness that would, left to itself, let all energy fall into dispersion and sleep. Rajas is kinesis, pravṛtti, the passion of seeking and desire and action that drives all life, restless because it never truly possesses what it pursues. Sattwa is the principle of light and balance, of understanding and harmony and a clear, measured happiness. And these three are never found apart. They are “inextricably intertwined in all cosmic existence”; tamas is driven by rajas and sustained by a hidden sattwic order even in the inertia of matter; rajas is checked by tamas and harmonised by sattwa; sattwa is overborne again and again by the strife of the other two.

So too in man. None of us is cast in the mould of a single guna. “Now sattwa leads, having overpowered rajas and tamas, O Bharata; now rajas, having overpowered sattwa and tamas; and now tamas” (14·10). We may speak of a sattwic or a rajasic or a tamasic nature only by a general predominance, never by an exclusive description; and the Gita adds that there is not an entity on earth, nor in heaven among the gods, that is free from the workings of these three qualities born of Nature (18·40). By these three kinds of becoming, it says, the whole world is bewildered and does not recognise Him who is supreme beyond them and imperishable (7·13). The modes are universal; and their universality is the veil.

nibadhnanti

The Triple Cord

The fourteenth chapter states the central fact without softening it.

सत्त्वं रजस्तम इति गुणाः प्रकृतिसम्भवाः ।निबध्नन्ति महाबाहो देहे देहिनमव्ययम् ॥

sattvaṃ rajastama iti guṇāḥ prakṛtisambhavāḥnibadhnanti mahābāho dehe dehinamavyayam

All three bind. That tamas binds is evident, for it is on both its sides an incapacity: “by negligence, indolence and sleep” (14·8) it holds the soul down in darkness and inaction. That rajas binds is no less evident, for it is “a child of the attachment of the soul to the desire of objects,” and it binds the embodied spirit “by attachment to works” (14·7); desire, which by its very nature implies non-possession, can never rest, and its pleasures are troubled and unstable because it does not know how to possess. But the Gita goes farther, and it is here that its psychology parts company with every merely ethical ideal. Sattwa too binds, “by attachment to knowledge and attachment to happiness” (14·6).

How can light be a bondage? Because it is a light of the mind, and the mind’s knowledge is limited and limiting; because the happiness of sattwa depends upon the right following or attainment of this or that object, or upon particular states of the mentality, upon “a light of mind which can be only a more or less clear twilight.” And because the good and the wise are not thereby free of the ego; they have only refined it.

For, as the Gita points out, the sattwa binds, as much as the other gunas, and binds just in the same way, by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purer ego, — but so long as in any form these two hold the being, there is no freedom.

The man of virtue has his ego of the virtuous man, the man of knowledge his ego of knowledge; for his own sake he seeks virtue and knowledge. This is the subtlest of the three cords, precisely because it is made of gold. And it is also the least secure, for sattwa in the natural being is perpetually besieged by rajas and tamas, and what seemed a settled peace may be overthrown in a moment by a surge of passion or a fall into dullness. “The play of the lower nature,” Sri Aurobindo writes in another place, “is a triple play,” and the other two qualities “are ever lying in wait for the sattwic man.” There is no final safety within the modes, not even within the highest of them.

rajoguṇasamudbhava

The Modes in the Scale of Nature and in Arjuna

If we would see the modes at work in their whole range, Sri Aurobindo suggests, we should watch them rising through the scale of Nature from the bottom to the top. In the atom and in inanimate matter tamas is supreme; there is a will even there, but the atom does not possess the will, it is possessed by it. In the plant rajas has struggled to the surface with its power of life and its nervous reactions, while sattwa is still quite involved. In the animal rajas prevails much more against tamas, bringing desire, emotion, passion, and sattwa emerges as the first light of the conscious mind, as memory and instinct and a first sense of ego. In man at last sattwa is awake, not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as a seeking for light, for right knowledge and right action, for the higher law of his own nature. He knows, however imperfectly, that he has to govern his rajasic and tamasic by his sattwic nature.

The dialogue of the Gita opens upon this very struggle in a single soul. Arjuna’s collapse upon the seat of his chariot, the bow slipping from his hand, the body trembling and the mind in a whirl, is the inrush of tamas; and it is significant that Krishna’s first words are not a consolation but a summons to rise, a rebuke of “this dejection, this stain and darkness of the soul,” “this paltry faintheartedness” (2·2–3). Beneath the collapse there moves the rajasic current, the grief and agitation of attachment to kin and the dread of loss; and above both there is a genuine sattwic concern for right and for the order of the world, which gives his refusal its noble voice. It is this mixture that makes his crisis so human and so instructive. The dark mode wears the garments of the bright one; the pity is real, and yet at its root it is “a small and false pity,” a weakness that has borrowed the language of dharma.

Later, when Arjuna asks what it is that drives a man to sin as if by force, even against his own struggling will (3·36), the answer names the second mode directly. “This is desire and its companion wrath, children of rajas, all-devouring, all-polluting, know thou this as the soul’s great enemy” (3·37). Rajas with its vehement hold on the vital ego, as Sri Aurobindo says in his reading of the eighteenth chapter, “is the great sinner and positive misleader.” Tamas obscures; rajas misleads; sattwa enlightens, and yet binds. The whole moral drama of man is played out among these three.

śraddhā

Faith, the Shape of the Soul

In the seventeenth chapter the analysis turns inward to its deepest root. Arjuna asks about those who worship with faith but outside the rule of the Shastra: of what mode is their devotion? And the answer opens with one of the most searching sayings of the Gita.

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

sattvānurūpā sarvasya śraddhā bhavati bhārataśraddhāmayo’yaṃ puruṣo yo yacchraddhaḥ sa eva saḥ

Śraddhāmayo’yaṃ puruṣaḥ: this soul in man is, as it were, made of faith, of a will to be, a belief in itself and existence; and whatever is that faith in him, he is that. Our faith is not a thing we hold at the surface of the mind; it is the shape our stuff of being has taken, and it takes that shape from the dominant quality of our nature (17·2). Therefore the same outward act may be of any mode. The tamasic man offers his sacrifice without faith, without the right rule, without the giving of food, without the dedicating mantra, done by rote because it comes in his way (17·13). The rajasic man may perform it correctly by every outward standard, but its motive is ostentation or a vehement demand for the fruit (17·12). The sattwic sacrifice is offered without desire for the personal fruit, according to the right principle, with the mind concentrated on the thing to be done as a sacrifice (17·11).

It is the inner state, motive and direction which give their value to our works, and not merely the apparent outer direction, the divine names we may call to sanction them or even the sincere intellectual belief which seems to justify us in the performance.

So it is with askesis and with giving, and so with food itself, which the Gita also divides by the modes. But Sri Aurobindo does not leave the sattwic sacrifice as the summit. It comes very near the ideal, yet it is still offered as a fixed dharma to some partial power or aspect of the Divine. Its culmination is a larger and freer offering to the Supreme in his integral being, for the good of the world; and that culmination leads to its own transcending, where “there is no personal action at all, no sattwic rule of dharma, no limitation of Shastra,” because the will that works is a supreme Will of which the soul is the instrument. The last sattwic faith is a faith that prepares its own exceeding.

sāttvika

Knowledge, Doer and Delight

The eighteenth chapter carries the same threefold light into knowledge, action, the doer, the understanding, the will and happiness itself. Tamasic knowledge is a small and narrow way of seeing, which clings to one movement or one routine as if it were the whole (18·22); rajasic knowledge sees the multiplicity of things only in their separateness (18·21); sattwic knowledge is that by which “one imperishable being is seen in all becoming, one indivisible whole in all these divisions” (18·20). The tamasic doer does not really put himself into the work; the rajasic doer is passionately desirous of fruit, full of joy in success and grief in failure; the sattwic doer is “free from attachment, free from egoism, full of a fixed (impersonal) resolution and a calm rectitude of zeal, unelated by success, undepressed by failure” (18·26–28).

Even pleasure is threefold. The tamasic has its dull satisfaction in sleep, indolence and delusion (18·39); the rajasic “at first is as nectar, but in the end is like poison” (18·38); the sattwic “at first is as poison but in the end is as nectar” (18·37), the happiness won by a labour of the soul, which rises at last like the nectar of immortality out of the churning of our nature. In each of these descriptions Sri Aurobindo discerns the same inner line of movement: the sattwic form, carried to its height, becomes something no longer sattwic at all. The sattwic knowledge of the One in all becomes the knowledge of the one Master of all works; the sattwic doer’s calm zeal becomes the steadfast movement of a divine energy in the human instrument; the sattwic happiness passes into Ananda. And the persistence of the aspiring understanding, dhṛti, when it is turned by Yoga to the highest (18·33), opens the gate.

It is there that arriving through the sattwic guna one can pass beyond the gunas, can climb beyond the limitations of the mind and its will and intelligence and sattwa itself disappear into that which is above the gunas and beyond this instrumental nature.

nityasattvastha

The Mediating Light

Here lies the practical secret of the whole discipline, and Sri Aurobindo sets it out with great clarity. There must be a transition from the bound working of the modes to the free action of the spirit, for nothing in God’s workings in this world is done without procedure or basis. Within the modes themselves there must be some leverage by which the change can be effected; and the Gita finds it in sattwa. Tamas cannot of itself become the divine repose, for it has no light to know what repose is; rajas cannot of itself become the divine will, for its movement is perverse through ignorance. Both need the intervention of the mode of light.

The sattwic quality is a first mediator between the higher and the lower nature. It must indeed at a certain point transform or escape from itself and break up and dissolve into its source; its conditioned derivative seeking light and carefully constructed action must change into the free direct dynamics and spontaneous light of the spirit.

Therefore tamas must be dominated by sattwa, and rajas purified by knowledge into a right and luminously informed action, before either can be taken up into its divine truth. The whole preparatory discipline of the Gita, its call to steadiness of the intelligent will, to self-mastery, to equality in pleasure and pain, to the sthitaprajña’s calm, is in this sense a development of sattwa. Yet it is a development whose end is beyond itself. We have to climb to the Self through sattwa, Sri Aurobindo writes in his reading of the determinism of Nature, but we reach it only when we get beyond sattwa.

This is why the injunction of the second chapter can say in one breath “become free from the triple guna” and “ever based in the true being.” There is a sattwa that is the highest mode of the lower nature, precious, precarious, dependent on conditions; and there is a luminous being beyond it of which this mode is the reflection. The first is to be used as a ladder; the second is where the ladder leads. The ascent is not by rejection of the lower modes, nor by settling in the highest of them, but by allowing the highest to become so full of light and calm that it passes over into its own source.

udāsīnavat

Seated as One High Above

The first sign of the soul’s freedom from the modes is not that they cease, but that it ceases to be moved by them. “When the seer perceives that the modes of Nature are the whole agency and cause of works and knows and turns to That which is supreme above the gunas,” says the Gita, “he attains to madbhāvaṁ (the movement and status of the Divine)” (14·19). Arjuna asks for the signs of such a man, and Krishna describes him.

उदासीनवदासीनो गुणैर्यो न विचाल्यते ।गुणा वर्तन्त इत्येवं योऽवतिष्ठति नेङ्गते ॥

udāsīnavadāsīno guṇairyo na vicālyateguṇā vartanta ityevaṃ yo’vatiṣṭhati neṅgate

Enlightenment, impulsion to works, the clouding over of the mental and nervous being, the effects of rising sattwa, rajas and tamas, may come and go in his outer nature; he neither abhors them when they come nor longs after them when they cease (14·22). He regards happiness and suffering alike, gold and mud and stone as of equal value, praise and blame, friend and enemy as equal things; he initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by the gunas of Nature (14·24–25). He is seated udāsīnavat, as one high above.

He has seated himself in the conscious light of another principle than the nature of the gunas and that greater consciousness remains steadfast in him, above these powers and unshaken by their motions like the sun above clouds to one who has risen into a higher atmosphere.

This is the impersonality of the Brahmic status, the Akshara, the immutable Self which witnesses the whole storm and calm of the modes and is not touched by them. It is a great liberation, and the Gita honours it. But Sri Aurobindo will not let us rest in it, for “still there is evidently here a double status, there is a scission of the being between two opposites”: a liberated spirit above watching an unliberated nature below. Is this division the highest possibility in the body? Is the end of the Yoga to drop the modes altogether and disappear into an everlasting impersonal peace? The Gita, returning always to its one final note, answers that there is something more.

guṇātīta

Undeviating Love and the Divine Originals

That something more is given in two verses that close the chapter and change the whole meaning of what has gone before.

मां च योऽव्यभिचारेण भक्तियोगेन सेवते ।स गुणान्समतीत्यैतान् ब्रह्मभूयाय कल्पते ॥

māṃ ca yo’vyabhicāreṇa bhaktiyogena sevatesa guṇānsamatītyaitān brahmabhūyāya kalpate

Not knowledge alone, not the witness alone, but an undeviating love and adoration, avyabhicāreṇa bhaktiyogena, carries the soul beyond the three gunas. And the “Me” of this verse is named at once: “I (the Purushottama) am the foundation of the silent Brahman and of Immortality and imperishable spiritual existence and of the eternal dharma and of an utter bliss of happiness” (14·27). Earlier the Teacher had said the same thing in the language of Maya: “This is my divine Maya of the gunas and it is hard to overcome; those cross beyond it who approach Me” (7·14). The modes are crossed not by one’s own sattwic perfection but by turning to the Lord of the modes.

There is a status then which is greater than the peace of the Akshara as it watches unmoved the strife of the gunas. There is a highest spiritual experience and foundation above the immutability of the Brahman, there is an eternal dharma greater than the rajasic impulsion to works … there is an absolute delight which is untouched by rajasic suffering and beyond the sattwic happiness, and these things are found and possessed by dwelling in the being and power of the Purushottama.

And now the three modes themselves appear in a new light. They are not arbitrary fetters; they are, Sri Aurobindo shows, the degraded forms of three powers of the Spirit. Behind the troubled kinesis of rajas is a divine will in action, free from desire because it possesses all. Behind the inertia of tamas is the eternal repose of the Godhead, which is not a disintegration of energy but a calm full of omnipotent power. Behind the light and happiness of sattwa is a greater light, jyotiḥ, and a delight that is not our paler mental happiness but Ananda. In the Spirit these three are not at war, nor merely balanced; each contains the others.

The calm of the liberated man is not an indolence, incapacity, insensibility, inertia; it is full of immortal power, capable of all action, attuned to deepest delight, open to profoundest love and compassion and to every manner of intensest Ananda.

Thus the soul that has risen above the modes is not emptied of the powers they caricatured. It keeps the calm, the force and the light, but in their divine original. Like the Brahman of the thirteenth chapter, “unattached, yet all-supporting,” the “enjoyer of the gunas, though not limited by them” (13·15), nirguṇaṃ guṇabhoktṛ ca, it may still act through a nature in which light and energy and rest are at play, and yet not be bound by that play; for their action in it has been lifted above their egoistic character and reactions.

Three modes of Nature, exceeded by their Lord

So the early word to Arjuna, spoken almost in passing, is fulfilled at the close. The liberated man, Sri Aurobindo writes, “remains even in action” beyond the gunas, and “he fulfils entirely at last the early injunction of the Gita,” nistraiguṇyo bhavārjuna. He has not fled from Nature into a featureless silence; he has found her Lord, and in finding him has found the truth of her. What was tamas becomes the unshakable peace from which all divine action proceeds; what was rajas becomes the free and joyous will of the Spirit, which strives without fever because it already possesses; what was sattwa becomes the light that does not need to be guarded, because it is self-existent.

And the passage is made by love. This is perhaps the most beautiful turn in the Gita’s long analysis: after all the careful discrimination of qualities in faith and food, in sacrifice and giving, in knowledge and will and pleasure, the last word is not a further discrimination but an adoration. The soul does not think its way out of the modes; it is drawn out of them by the Beloved who stands above them and within them, whose Maya they are and whose delight they veil. The charioteer who smiled at Arjuna’s darkness on the field of Kurukshetra knew that the three cords which bound his friend were woven of his own power, and could be loosed by a single turning of the heart towards him. To become free from the triple guna is at last to become his: to live in the Purushottama, in that utter bliss of happiness of which even the brightest pleasure of the mind was only a distant and passing gleam.

The verses of this essay

Chapter 2

1. 45

Chapter 3

1. 36
2. 37

Chapter 7

1. 13
2. 14

Chapter 14

1. 5
2. 6
3. 7
4. 8
5. 10
6. 19
7. 22
8. 23
9. 26
10. 27

Chapter 17

1. 3
2. 11

Chapter 18

1. 20
2. 26
3. 37
4. 40

• Above the Gunas
• The Gunas, Faith and Works
• The Gunas, Mind and Works
• Deva and Asura
• The Determinism of Nature
• Beyond the Modes of Nature
• Equality
• Swabhava and Swadharma
• The Vision of the World Spirit; Time and Destroyer