Getting to know the gunas.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” These first words from Genesis are familiar to anyone who’s picked up a Bible. People with religious or spiritual leanings assume the concept of creation. We accept that the universe was created—not quite by accident. Although, who’s to say that an all-powerful being didn’t light the fuse that caused the big bang?
Stories and explanations of creation appear in the various schools of yoga philosophy. A common thread among them is the subtle materials involved—they are known as the gunas.
Gunas are a pervasive principle in yoga philosophy. References to them are found in all major yogic texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Yoga Sutras, and Srimad Bhagavatam. Yoga masters refer to them in their teachings.
Understanding the meanings and effects of the gunas can help us on the spiritual path. Indeed, without this understanding, your journey along the path of yoga might be more difficult.
The Meaning and Nature of the Gunas
The Sanskrit word guna has many meanings. The most common meaning is “quality.” Other synonyms include aspect, element, trait, factor, and property. The gunas are sometimes called the subtle substances of creation. If it helps your conception of the term, you may also think of the gunas as Mother Nature.
There are three main gunas, each with their own descriptive characteristics. These qualities function in certain ways. They have personalities as shown in the table below:
| Sattva Goodness/Purity |
Rajas Energy/Activity |
Tamas Sloth |
|---|---|---|
| Truthfulness, virtue | Intense activity | Mental ignorance and dullness |
| Poise, calmness, compassion | Mental restlessness | Excessive sleep, laziness, procrastination, inertia |
| Self-control, dispassion, discrimination | Intense desire, lust, longing | Greed, expectation, infatuation, evil desires |
Yogic texts and masters describe the functions of the gunas in more detail. An expanded version of this table provides more detail about these qualities of Nature.
Understanding How the Gunas Work in Your Life
The gunas, qualities of nature, are not difficult to understand. They work in the physical world as well as our mental world. The gunas can be seen in both subtle and gross form.
As an analogy, imagine the Creator is an artist, a Divine Painter. A painter begins with three primary colors—yellow, red, and blue. He then mixes them to create more colors and places them on the canvas. This canvas, then, is the Creator’s universe. It is always evolving, ever-changing.
The Creator paints the universe with the gunas. Every stroke of paint contains the qualities of goodness (yellow), energy (red), and sloth (blue). Rarely, is the paint made of one pure color, or quality. Usually it’s mixed. Often, one color dominates. In the same way, we experience a mixture of these qualities.
Examples of Gunas Working in the World
For more about the gunas (aff link).
To further help us get to know the gunas, we can observe extreme examples of their effects.
An example of sattva, the quality of goodness, can be seen in people like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama. These people worked tirelessly throughout their lives for the benefit of others. But we don’t need a Nobel Prize to recognize goodness. The mother who devotes her time to raising her children, the shopkeeper who prices his goods fairly, the employer who provides a pleasant and safe working environment—all these are common examples of people living simple lives of goodness.
We can look to companies in high-growth industries for examples of rajas. Intense action dominates such a corporation, as well as its individual employees. The corporate culture demands dedication and long hours. Its reward is financial success. The desire for more growth and success increases and drives more action.
Tamas, the guna of sloth, is not only recognized by laziness and inertia. The effects of tamas also include fear, anger, and actions done with the intent to harm others. It is easily known by remembering the events of 9/11. While thousands of innocent people were killed on that day, others celebrated. Those who celebrated imagined that their ideals had been realized by the slaughter. This is tamas at its worst.
How to Use Knowledge of the Gunas
Think of the gunas as a tool of self-assessment. Learning about them helps us see how we can improve our outlook and ourselves.
The qualities are like a stepladder. For example, if we want to experience peace and happiness we should increase the quality of goodness. But sometimes we’re lazy and neglect our practices or good works. When that happens we can use the next quality, energy, to get moving. The cure for spiritual laziness is action. Chanting, yoga postures, and service all help remove sloth. We evolve from the slothful lower quality, to the next one, rajas. Then, lest we get stuck in endless activity, we must meditate more to progress into goodness.
The cycle of movement through the gunas is constant. As spiritual aspirants, we benefit from becoming aware of their presence. Meditation increases awareness. Through the clarity of a pure mind we can see the effects of goodness, energy, or sloth in our lives. We can make wise decisions, move out of a lower guna, and increase our goodness.
Sincere spiritual seekers take delight in being established in sattva, goodness. It paves the way—to enlightenment.
Chityānanda has been a disciple of Svāmī Gurupremānanda Sarasvatī since 1975. She teaches meditation and yoga as a spiritual path in Santa Cruz, California.
SG leads the way with his appreciation for your expanded chart of the Gunas.
This truly is a remarkable effort that reflects both your research and genuine understanding of the principles involved. Congratulations and Thank you.
The clarity of the one line about Tamas/sloth is so insightful: “faith in dishonesty.” Perfectly said. Please keep up the good work! 🙂
Thank you for your encouragement, Rob. It’s always helpful to know what strikes a person’s fancy. At the end of the expanded chart is a list of references. One of those references noted “faith in dishonesty” as a sign of tamas. Just so you know that I didn’t come up with that myself. I also appreciated it, so included it in the chart. Namaste.
Thank you for this post. I too, like the analogy of the 3 primary colors. I’ve been observing these qualities in myself and tailoring my asana practice in relation to them.
Thank you for your comment, Karyn. I’m glad you enjoyed the idea of gunas as primary colors. It’s a visual we can all relate to. I’m sure others would enjoy hearing of your experience of observing the gunas within your asana (yoga postures, for those unfamiliar with the term) practice. I would especially like to hear your thoughts on how you think of shavasana (corpse pose) from the viewpoint of gunas. Would you be interested in writing a guest post on the subject of gunas and asana practice? I think it would be very interesting and helpful. Namaste.
I want to thank you for the Expanded Gunas Chart. Everybody interested in yoga knows about the Gunas, and that there are three chapters devoted to the Gunas in the Bhagavad Gita. But, no book has ever put them together showing the relationship of the tendencies. The same tendencies are in each of the Gunas, but how they are expressed is different.
As a person evolves spiritually, his qualities and tendencies become spiritualized. You’ve shown this progression, for example, in Faith. When a seeker does spiritual practices, he no longer has Faith in dishonesty. Then his Faith is in his actions, until he evolves more. Faith in God and Guru is the purest form of Faith.
Thank you for your nice comment, SG. I’m so happy to know that the expanded gunas chart was useful to you. Yoga philosophy can be very practical to us in our daily lives. However, it’s not very well organized. I found it very helpful when I made this chart. Then I understood the workings of the gunas much better than ever before. Now they’re no more mysterious to me than wind, water, and air! Namaste.
Thank you so much Svāmī Chityānanda, I always had the impression that understanding the gunas was complicated and required special literature and stuff. But I get this, and I am very pleased because understanding the gunas is critical to the understanding of yoga and life in general.
Hello, Mary. I’m so happy to hear that you like the article on the gunas. You note a sort of “best kept secret” on the spiritual path of yoga. Actually, the teachings are very simple and easy to understand. Knowing them gets clouded by the sheer volume of material. If you stick with a few basic truths throughout your life, you’ll benefit most. Namaste.
I see these tendencies in operation every day in myself and other people. It is good for me to aspire to be more sattvic in my thinking and behavior.
Thank you for your comment, Tim. You’re fortunate to be so aware of the working of the gunas in yourself and others. The gunas affect everything, so we can make better life choices by being aware. Namaste.
This is another great post, Svāmī Chityānanda. When I started on my yogic path 7 years ago or so, one of the first things I studied was about the gunas. I learned that sunlight (giving energy) is sattvic whereas neon light (like a kitchen light) takes energy away and is thus tamasic. Similarly, organic foods are sattvic and tinned foods, tamasic. I now begin to understand how gunas reach beyond the things around us and can play a part in who we are and what we become. Thank you.
Thank you, James, for adding some examples of the gunas playing in everyday things like light and food. Examples help us to become aware of the effects of the gunas around us. Namaste.
Svami,
Your analogy of the primary colors and mixing of paints is superb! As I read I was thinking, “I hope she tells us how to use them.” You did; and thanks for that.
Thank you, Richard. I’m so glad to know that your curiosity was satisfied. Namaste.
Great sign posts! All three gunas are available to help me measure my progress. This is also a good exercise that requires me to step out of my own ego to have a “come to Jesus” evaluation of where I’m at spiritually.
Thank you, John. I’m glad you found the article helpful. I enjoyed writing it because it made me more aware of the constant influence of the gunas — and then I make a choice of whether or not I’m happy with the predominant guna. Namaste.