Gunatraya Vibhaga Yoga
Krishna explains the three gunas, or fundamental qualities, that make up material nature and bind the embodied soul within it: sattva, marked by clarity, lightness and attachment to happiness and knowledge; rajas, marked by passion and restless attachment to action and its fruit; and tamas, marked by ignorance, heaviness, negligence and sleep. Every person is a shifting mixture of these three, and Krishna teaches how to recognize which guna currently dominates by its signs — the clear light of understanding for sattva, greed and turbulence for rajas, delusion and inertia for tamas — and what kind of rebirth or state each tends to produce. The chapter's real aim, though, is to point beyond the gunas altogether: Arjuna asks what a person looks like who has transcended the three qualities entirely, and Krishna describes such a person as one who watches the gunas operate with equanimity, unmoved by their play, free from birth, death, old age and sorrow, and thereby fit for oneness with Brahman.
“Sattva, rajas, and tamas — these three gunas, born of nature, bind fast in the body the imperishable embodied soul.”
“Sattva binds through attachment to happiness and attachment to knowledge, being itself untainted and luminous.”
“Tamas, born of ignorance, deludes all embodied beings and binds them through negligence, indolence, and sleep.”
“When the light of knowledge shines forth in all the gates of the body, then it may be known that sattva has increased.”
“When the embodied soul transcends these three gunas that arise with the body, freed from birth, death, old age and sorrow, it attains immortality.”
“One who serves me with unwavering yoga of devotion, having transcended these gunas, becomes fit for oneness with Brahman.”
Chapter summaries composed for MyBrahman; verse translations from the public-domain Kashinath Trimbak Telang translation (1882, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 8) where directly checkable, and/or widely-attested traditional renderings of famous verses, cited by standard chapter.verse numbering.