Chapter 17 · Verse 10·Spoken by Krishna
यातयामं गतरसं पूति पर्युषितं च यत्।उच्छिष्टमपि चामेध्यं भोजनं तामसप्रियम्
yāta-yāmaṁ gata-rasaṁ pūti paryuṣhitaṁ cha yat uchchhiṣhṭam api chāmedhyaṁ bhojanaṁ tāmasa-priyam
Food that is stale, tasteless, putrid, and left overnight, as well as scraps and what is unclean, is dear to those of tamas.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
his verse completes the three-part picture of food begun a few verses earlier. After describing the food loved by sattvic and rajasic people, Krishna now names the food dear to the person of tamas, the disposition of dullness, inertia, and darkness. The list runs through six marks: yata-yama (food whose 'watch' or yama, a span of about three hours, has passed, so it has gone cold and lost its vigor), gata-rasa (sapless, its juice or essence squeezed or dried out), puti (foul-smelling, putrid), paryushita (stale, cooked the day before with a night intervening), ucchishta (leftovers, the remainder of what others have already eaten), and amedhya (impure, unfit even to be offered in sacrifice). Such food is loved by the tamasic person. Most commentators read the six terms in close agreement, differing only in small examples.
Braided from 13 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The deeper point is that this food is the very mirror of tamas itself. Where sattvic food is fresh, savory, nourishing, and life-giving, tamasic food is the exact opposite at every step: stale against fresh, sapless against juicy, foul against agreeable, cold against living. Several commentators line the qualities up term by term as direct oppositions to the sattvic list, showing that the food a person craves exhibits the inner quality that rules him. The food is not merely poor; it carries the stamp of darkness and increases it.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Rāmānujācārya
Because tamasic food increases tamas, the practical conclusion drawn by many commentators is the same: such food is to be shunned, kept at a great distance, by anyone who seeks his own welfare and the growth of sattva. The verse is therefore not just a description but a guide. By watching what food a person genuinely loves, one can read his inner disposition; and by deliberately choosing sattvic food, one can nourish the sattva that the spiritual path requires.
Rāmānujācārya · Dhanapati Sūri · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Several commentators note that for the tamasic person the painful consequences of this food, the sorrow, grief, and disease it brings, are not even spelled out in the verse, unlike the rajasic food whose fruits are named. The reason given is that this food is so plainly corrupt by its very nature that its harm needs no statement; and the tamasic eater, being deluded, attends to neither the food nor its result and simply falls upon it. The omission itself marks how far gone the tamasic disposition is.
Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Puruṣottama · Swami Ramsukhdas
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
On the first term, yata-yama, these commentators follow the older gloss that reads it as 'half-cooked' rather than only 'gone cold after a watch.' Sankara renders it directly as half-cooked. A small grammatical objection is then raised and answered: since the verse also has the separate word gata-rasa (taste-gone), some hold that yata-yama really means the food that has lost its strength or nourishing power, the 'strengthless,' rather than the half-cooked, so that the two terms do not simply repeat each other. Madhusudana records both views, that yata-yama is boiled rice and the like grown cold after a watch, and that others take gata-rasa as churned milk and such with the essence drawn out. Madhusudana also adds, from the medical treatises, that the catch-all word 'and' gathers in all unwholesome foods named there, and notes that here the opposition to sattva is both a seen and an unseen one, which is the excess of tamas over rajas.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Śrī Ānandagiri
Bhakti
These devotional commentators accept the standard list but carry it one step further toward the Lord. For them even the threefold worldly food, sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic alike, is finally to be set aside by the devotee. The true food of the bhakta is none of the three: it is the leftover of the Lord's own enjoyment, prasada, the food first offered to God. So food not yet offered to the Lord is to be given up even if it is sattvic, while food that has been offered becomes dear to those devotees who stand beyond the three gunas. In this way the chapter's food-teaching is read as quietly leading the devotee out of the gunas altogether and into the nirguna circle of the Lord's grace.
Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīla Viśvanātha
Modern
The modern commentators widen the list to the conditions of ordinary life. They name intoxicants and drugs, ganja, bhang, opium, cocaine, charas, liquor, and fermented toddy, as tamasic, along with all stale and putrid articles. One commentator stresses that the very same teaching points not at the foods but at the eater's relish, since the whole passage describes the man, not the dish; he adds that even sattvic food eaten with attachment becomes rajasic, and eaten greedily to the point of indigestion becomes tamasic, while conversely food that is dry or stale in itself can be redeemed when it is offered to God and taken in small measure with the Lord's name, so that the inner attitude, not the dish alone, finally decides the guna. He also broadens 'impure' (amedhya) to flesh, fish, eggs, and to whatever is prohibited by scripture for one's station in life.
Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If the same dish can be sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic depending on how and in what spirit it is eaten, is this verse really about the food at all, or about the person eating it?
It is finally about the person. The verse says this food is 'dear to the tamasic,' and the whole passage is framed around what a man loves; by watching what food someone genuinely craves you can read the disposition that rules him, which is why the eater, not the dish, is the real subject.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Vedānta Deśika · Śrī Puruṣottama
Yet the food still matters, because food and inner quality run in a circle: tamasic food increases tamas, and so it pulls the eater further into the very darkness it expresses. That is why the practical counsel is to keep such food at a distance and choose fresh, sattvic food, for the sake of growing sattva.
Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva
The spirit of eating can change the guna of a dish: the same food eaten with attachment turns rajasic, eaten greedily to excess turns tamasic, and even a poor dish offered to God and taken in small measure with the divine name is lifted toward sattva. So the verse points to both the food and the heart behind it, and asks you to purify both.
Swami Ramsukhdas
Contemplation
Take the teaching as being about your own relish, not merely your menu. Before the meal, wash your hands, feet, and mouth, sit on a clean seat in a clean place, and quiet the mind; food eaten amid envy, fear, anger, or hurry does not even digest well, so let yourself be calm and glad as you eat. Then turn the meal itself into worship: offer the food to God before you take it, and chew each mouthful while inwardly repeating the divine name, so that, as the counsel puts it, eating itself becomes remembrance of God. Done this way, even food that was poor in itself is lifted by the spirit in which it is received. The point of the verse is not anxious avoidance of every cold or leftover dish, but the steady cultivation of purity of food, which the old teaching links to purity of mind.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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