A section from the journey
The Three Strands
The Upanishads plant a small but mighty seed. They hint that all of nature is woven of three strands, called gunas. One is clear and light. One is restless and fiery. One is heavy and dull. Everything we see is a blend of the three. This is only a seed here. Its full teaching waits for a later age.
Take a rope in your hands and look closely. It seems like one thing. But twist it open, and you find it is made of strands wound together. Pull them apart and the rope is gone. The sages had a quiet idea like this about the whole of nature. They said it too is made of strands.
They called these strands . The word means just that — a strand, a thread, a quality wound in with others. And they spoke of three. All of nature, they hinted, all the spread-out world we touched in the last lesson, is woven of three strands, always together, always blending.
The first strand is called . It is the clear and the light. Think of a still lake at dawn, a calm mind, a kind and steady act. Sattva is harmony, brightness, the quality that lets us see truly. When sattva rises in you, you feel peaceful and awake.
The second strand is called . It is the restless and the fiery. Think of a leaping flame, a racing heart, a strong wanting. Rajas is passion and motion and drive. It gets things done, and it can also pull us this way and that, never still. When rajas rises, you feel busy, hungry, on fire.
The third strand is called . It is the heavy and the dull. Think of thick darkness, a stone that will not move, a mind grown sleepy and slow. Tamas is weight and inertia. It can be rest, and it can also be dullness that drags us down. When tamas rises, you feel heavy, clouded, still in the wrong way.
Now here is the key. Nothing is made of only one strand. You are not all clear, or all fiery, or all heavy. Every person, every mood, every thing is a shifting blend of all three. In a single day you may feel the calm of sattva at dawn, the fire of rajas at work, the heaviness of tamas at dusk. The three are always braided together, one rising as another falls.
Here are the three strands as one figure. At the three corners stand sattva, the clear and light; rajas, the restless and fiery; and tamas, the heavy and dull. Every mood and every thing sits somewhere inside the triangle, a blend of all three — never at one corner alone. Watch which strand is rising in you right now.
And now your guide must keep his promise of honesty. What we have planted here is a seed, and only a seed. The Upanishads give the three strands their early hint. But the full, glorious teaching of the gunas — how they shape all we do, and how a person may rise from the heavy toward the clear — waits for a later book in our journey, the Bhagavad Gita. There the three strands will bloom. For now, simply learn their three names, and begin to watch them play.
Sit quietly for a moment and ask which strand is strongest in you just now. Is it the calm clearness of sattva, the restless fire of rajas, or the heaviness of tamas? There is no wrong answer. The sages only invite you to notice.
Here we plant a seed that will one day grow into one of Hinduism's great teaching-tools: the three gunas. The word means "strands," like the threads twisted together to make a rope. The sages hint that all of nature, prakriti, is woven of three such strands. The first is sattva, the clear and light — calm, bright, the quality of harmony and knowing. The second is rajas, the restless and fiery — passion, motion, drive. The third is tamas, the heavy and dull — darkness, weight, inertia. Nothing in the world is made of only one. Every person, every mood, every thing is a shifting blend of all three, now one rising, now another. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad gives this its early hint, picturing nature itself in three colours. But this is a seed only. The full and famous teaching of the gunas, and how a person may rise through them, waits for the Bhagavad Gita, many pages on. Here we simply learn the three names, and begin to watch them at play.
❧1 of 1
Page 1 of 1