त्रिविधा भवति श्रद्धा देहिनां सा स्वभावजा ।सात्त्विकी राजसी चैव तामसी चेति तां शृणु ॥
trividhā bhavati śraddhā dehināṁ sā svabhāvajāsāttvikī rājasī caiva tāmasī ceti tāṁ śṛṇu
The Blessed Lord said: The faith in embodied beings is of a triple kind like all things in Nature and varies according to the dominating quality of their nature, sattwa, rajas or tamas. Hear thou of these.
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
AI translation
Essays on the Gita
Now we have to see how the Gita deals with this question on its own line of spiritual teaching and self-discipline. For Arjuna puts immediately a suggestive query from which the problem or one aspect of it arises. When men, he says, sacrifice17·1 to God or the gods with faith, śraddhā, but abandon the rule of the Shastra, what is that concentrated will of devotion in them, niṣṭhā, which gives them this faith and moves them to this kind of action? Is it sattwa, rajas or tamas? to which strand of our nature does it belong? The answer of the Gita first states the principle that the faith in us is of a triple kind like all things in17·2 Nature and varies according to the dominating quality of our nature. The faith of each man takes the shape, hue, quality given17·3 to it by his stuff of being, his constituting temperament, his innate power of existence, sattvānurūpā sarvasya śraddhā. And then there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of śraddhā, a faith, a will to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he. Śraddhāmayo ‘yaṁ puruṣo yo yac-chraddhaḥ sa eva saḥ. If we look into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find that this single line contains implied in its few forceful words almost the whole theory of the modern gospel of pragmatism. For if a man or the soul in a man consists of the faith which is in him, taken in this deeper sense, then it follows that the truth which he sees and wills to live is for him the truth of his being, the truth of himself that he has created or is creating and there can be for him no other real truth. This truth is a thing of his inner and outer action, a thing of his becoming, of the soul’s dynamics, not of that in him which never changes. He is what he is today by some past will of his nature sustained and continued by a present will to know, to believe and to be in his intelligence and vital force, and whatever new turn is taken by this will and faith active in his very substance, that he will tend to become in the future. We create our own truth of existence in our own action of mind and life, which is another way of saying that we create our own selves, are our own makers.
