Chapter 14 · Verse 7·Spoken by Arjuna
रजो रागात्मकं विद्धि तृष्णासङ्गसमुद्भवम्।तन्निबध्नाति कौन्तेय कर्मसङ्गेन देहिनम्
rajo rāgātmakaṁ viddhi tṛiṣhṇā-saṅga-samudbhavam tan nibadhnāti kaunteya karma-saṅgena dehinam
Know that passion is made of longing, born of thirst and attachment. It binds the embodied self through attachment to action, Arjuna.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
his verse defines the second of the three gunas, the strands or qualities that make up all of nature. Rajas, the active strand, is said to be raga-atmaka: its very nature is raga, which means passion or attachment. Several commentators unpack the word through its root, ranj, to dye or to color, comparing rajas to red ochre or a dye that stains the mind. Just as a dye colors a white cloth, rajas colors consciousness, drawing it toward objects and pulling it outward toward the world. So rajas is not a thing that merely sits in us; it is the coloring force that tints the mind with desire and turns attention toward things to be gained and enjoyed.
Braided from 13 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Ramsukhdas
Krishna then names what arises from rajas: trishna and sanga, craving and clinging. Many commentators draw a precise line between the two. Trishna, craving or thirst, is the longing for what has not yet been obtained. Sanga, clinging or attachment, is the fondness for what has already been obtained, the affection that wants to hold and guard it. So rajas works in two directions at once: it makes us reach for what we lack, and it makes us cling to what we have. One commentator adds that this thirst is never satisfied even when the object is gained, which is why it keeps the mind perpetually restless and reaching.
Braided from 9 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The verse states how rajas binds: by karma-sanga, attachment to action. Out of craving and clinging, the embodied being throws himself into activity to get what he wants and keep what he has, and he becomes attached to acting itself. Each act, aimed at seen ends (worldly results) or unseen ends (merit stored for later, even for heaven), carries fruit that must be experienced; experiencing it requires another birth in a fitting womb; so the chain of action and rebirth continues. Rajas therefore binds not by stopping action but by entangling the being in it, so that he keeps spinning the wheel of doing and being reborn to reap.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The verse calls the bound one the dehin, the embodied one or body-dweller. Several commentators stress that the Self is in truth not the doer; it is the silent witness. What rajas produces is the false conceit I am the doer, the superimposition of agency onto a Self that does not act. By this conceit the non-doer is set into motion and held in bondage. The address dehin is read as pointed: this binding reaches only the one who identifies himself with the body. The witnessing Self, rightly known, is untouched by rajas and its activity.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Sivananda · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators give raga a concrete, specific sense: passion is the mutual longing of woman and man, the drive of sexual and familial attachment. From this base, thirst is read as the longing for sense-objects such as sound, and clinging as the longing for close union with relations: son, friend, and the like. The binding action is then read very concretely too: out of desire for woman and son a man performs actions; those actions bring him back to woman, son, and the rest, which are the very means of experiencing the fruit; and the cycle repeats, so there is no liberation from rajas. This grounds the abstract teaching in the most ordinary human bonds. (Baladeva's source here is in the Bhakti stream but reads raga in the same concrete way.)
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Baladeva
Śuddhādvaita
This commentator hears raga not as a generic coloring of the mind but as anu-ranjana, the coloring-after of Bhagavan that was its first and proper intent, now gone astray. On this reading, all the manifold things were brought forth for the sake of Bhagavan. Trishna, the craving that binds, is the longing of one's own born of forgetting just this, of taking for oneself what was made for Bhagavan; and the clinging to action that follows is effort set out on that same forgetful basis. So the bondage is not desire as such but the misdirection of a coloring that should have turned toward the Lord and instead turned toward private possession.
Śrī Puruṣottama
Dvaita
This school reads the compound trishna-sanga-samudbhavam with grammatical care. Against an explanation that would make rajas the thing produced from craving and attachment, the analysis is that samudbhava means the cause or source: rajas is that from which craving and attachment arise, not the other way round. The commentary notes that reading samudbhava the other way (as mere manifestation) would conflict both with the earlier statement that the gunas are born of prakriti and with the present context, which is stating the effects of the gunas. So fidelity to the surrounding teaching settles the grammar in favor of rajas as the originating cause.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Modern
This commentator addresses head-on a competing view, that of Patanjala-yoga, which takes activity (kriya) itself as the very nature of rajas. He holds that Bhagavan, while admitting activity as a secondary aspect, takes raga, attachment, as the primary nature of rajas. The proof is drawn from the Gita itself: one is told to do one's duties while letting go of attachment (2.48), and the man of desireless action is not tainted (3.19); even the gunatita does not place raga in activity when it rises (14.22). The conclusion is that it is attachment that binds, not the strand of activity as such. He further reads the compound both ways at once, as producing craving and as produced from them, since like seed and tree they mutually beget each other; and he notes that even Bhagavan's own creative act at the dawn of the great cycle is rajasic in kind yet wholly free of attachment (4.13).
Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If rajas binds through attachment to action, must I stop acting to be free, or is there a way to act without being bound?
The verse is careful about what actually binds. It is not action itself but karma-sanga, attachment to action, and behind that the craving and clinging that drive a person into activity to get and keep things. So the problem is the attachment, not the doing.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Swami Ramsukhdas
This is made explicit by the reading that activity as such is not the binding nature of rajas; attachment is. The same teacher points to the Gita's own counsel to do one's duties while letting go of attachment, and notes that the desireless actor is not tainted by his acts, and that even the one beyond the gunas does not invest attachment in activity when it arises. The freedom, then, is to act without craving the fruit.
Swami Ramsukhdas
There is a deeper ground for this freedom: the Self is not in truth the doer at all but the silent witness, and rajas binds only by producing the false conceit I am the doer. So one is not freed by ceasing to move but by ceasing to identify as the agent and as the body, since the binding reaches only the one who takes himself to be the body.
Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
The remedy offered here is not to stop acting but to change how you hold your action. Do the duty in front of you, fitted to the situation at hand, but do it nishkama, without craving its fruit; and do not pick up new undertakings merely to accumulate more or to feed your own enjoyment, since it is exactly this reaching for more, day and night, that crowds out the very chance for your liberation. To loosen the grip of craving, reflect honestly on how long any of it can last: every visible thing is slipping into the unseen at every moment, life into death, each unfolding into its dissolution. The childhood and youth that have passed cannot return, nor can the time you have spent. The ends of great kings and wealthy men, and the ruins of their great palaces, tell you plainly that your own body, wealth, and house will go the same way. This clear-eyed reflection brings a calmer, more luminous quality into the mind and quietly lifts you above attachment to action.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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