Chapter 18 · Verse 31·Spoken by Krishna
यया धर्ममधर्मं च कार्यं चाकार्यमेव च।अयथावत्प्रजानाति बुद्धिः सा पार्थ राजसी
yayā dharmam adharmaṁ cha kāryaṁ chākāryam eva cha ayathāvat prajānāti buddhiḥ sā pārtha rājasī
The discernment that grasps dharma and adharma wrongly, and what should be done and what should not, that discernment, Arjuna, is of passion.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna here describes the second kind of buddhi, the rajasic understanding. Buddhi is the faculty of judgment, the inner power by which a person decides what is right and what is wrong, what should be done and what should be left undone. The verse names two pairs that this faculty must sort out: dharma and adharma, lawful and unlawful action, and karya and akarya, what is to be done and what is not to be done in a given situation. The rajasic buddhi engages all of these. It is not blank or asleep before them.
Braided from 12 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas · Dhanapati Sūri
The defect of this intellect is captured in one word, ayathavat, which means 'not as it truly is.' The rajasic buddhi does know something of right and wrong; it just does not know them correctly or completely. Several commentators stress that this is precisely what distinguishes it from the lowest kind of intellect: it is not total ignorance but a flawed, partial, unsettled grasp. It registers the pairs but reads them wrongly, leaving the matter unsettled and ending in doubt or indecision, the wavering 'is it this way or not?'
Braided from 10 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Vedānta Deśika · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya
Because this buddhi cannot tell the pairs apart cleanly, it mixes them. It blends desirable and undesirable actions, good and bad, taking up things without sifting whether they are pure or impure. The mark of the rajasic intellect is this failure to discriminate steadily; it lacks the firm, settled determination that would let it serve as a trustworthy guide. As a result it cannot be relied on for the discernment a seeker actually needs.
Sant Jñāneśvar · Vallabhācārya · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Śaṅkarācārya
Several teachers add that this distorted seeing is not random. The intellect is twisted by the person's own likes and dislikes, raga and dvesha, and by the heat of personal preference. What favors the man he calls dharma; what goes against what he wants he calls adharma. The very duty that is binding for another in the same position he reads as not his to do, because doing it would cost him some comfort; and what he ought not to do he calls a duty, because doing it would win him some pleasure. The judgment bends around the self's stake rather than reporting the matter as it stands.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Vallabhācārya
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read dharma and adharma strictly through scripture: dharma is action enjoined by scripture and adharma is action it prohibits. They take care to explain why the verse names two seemingly overlapping pairs. The pair dharma and adharma covers action whose fruit is unseen, that is, action whose result lies beyond ordinary sight and is known only from scripture; the pair 'to be done and not to be done' covers action of seen purpose, ordinary practical action whose result is visible here. So the two pairs are not redundant: they mark the unseen-purposed and the seen-purposed alike, and the rajasic buddhi misjudges both. One source also notes a fine grammatical point, that the instrumental case 'by which' used here should be carried over to explain the other verses in this set as well.
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Ānandagiri · Dhanapati Sūri · Swami Sivananda
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators emphasize that correct knowledge of duty is always knowledge of duty in its concrete particulars: the duty is to be known as it truly is in the specific conditions of place, time, and personal state, and for those settled in those conditions. The rajasic buddhi fails exactly here. It knows the pairs in a general, blurred way but cannot situate them rightly in the real circumstances, so its grasp falls short of the truth of the matter.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Dvaita
These commentators argue the point by contrast, to fix why this intellect is rajasic and not the lower, tamasic kind. The rajasic buddhi is one where there is no fixed rule that it conforms to the truth: it may hit the truth or miss it, with no guarantee either way. This is what 'knows incorrectly' really means here, not that it is bound to be false, but that nothing assures it will be true. If instead it were taken to know rightly as a rule, then it could not be told apart from the tamasic intellect at all, since the difference between the two grades would collapse. The absence of any rule of correctness is precisely what separates the middle grade from the lowest.
Madhvācārya · Śrī Jayatīrtha
Śuddhādvaita
These commentators read the pairs in relation to the Lord. One frames the rajasic buddhi as one that knows dharma and what is contrary to it but mixes right and wrong by the heat of its own preferences, so it fails as the trustworthy guide the seeker needs. The other interprets the very terms in terms of the Lord's will: dharma is the form of the Lord's will and adharma the form of what is not his will, while karya is service of the Lord and akarya is any other action. The rajasic buddhi grasps all of these uncertainly, with doubt, or grasps them the wrong way round.
Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama
Bhakti
These commentators dwell on vivid images of mixed and unreliable perception. One says the rajasic intellect takes things in a way fit only to leave a residue of doubt. The other, in an extended set of similes, likens it to one who cannot separate milk from water, to a blind man for whom there is no difference between day and night, and to a buyer picking pearls with his eyes shut who gets only inferior ones. Such an intellect handles all actions without seeing whether they are pure or impure, and leaves out the undesirable ones only by chance, when they happen not to be at hand.
Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīdhara Svāmī
Modern
These commentators sharpen the practical test. One gives the clearest psychology of the defect: the rajasic buddhi is articulate and can sound very clear while still being rajasic, because its seeing is bent by inner liking and disliking, so it reads as dharma whatever favors the man and as adharma whatever crosses his preferred result; the test is whether the buddhi tells the truth of the matter as it stands regardless of one's own stake (then it is sattvic) or as it stands in one's own stake (then it is rajasic). Another defines dharma and adharma not merely by social duty but by their effect: dharma is what elevates you toward the Self, adharma what hurls you down into ignorance, and ayathavat means contrary to what is settled by all authorities and by the highest knowledge. A third simply states that such reason fails to arrive at a proper discrimination between righteous and unrighteous, doable and not-doable.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Sivananda
A Seeker Asks
If my intellect can feel perfectly clear and still be quietly distorted by what I want, how would I ever catch myself in a rajasic judgment?
Start by noticing that the danger is not confusion but confidence. The rajasic buddhi is not described as blank or doubtful at first; it knows dharma and adharma, it just knows them ayathavat, not as they truly are. It can sound perfectly clear and still be rajasi precisely because it is articulate. So clarity of feeling is no proof of correctness.
Swami Ramsukhdas · Śaṅkarācārya · Vedānta Deśika
The reliable test is not how certain you feel but whose interest your verdict serves. When the buddhi tells the truth of the matter as it stands, irrespective of your own stake, it is working rightly; when it tells the truth as it stands in your stake, it has gone rajasic. Watch for the pattern: what favors you being read as dharma, what costs you being read as adharma, the duty that would be binding for another in your place quietly becoming 'not for me.'
Swami Ramsukhdas · Vallabhācārya
A further check is the mixing and the residue of doubt. A rajasic judgment tends to blend desirable and undesirable together rather than sift them cleanly, and it leaves an unsettled aftertaste, the wavering 'is it really this way?' If you find your conclusions running together without firm discrimination, or trailing a quiet hum of unease, that is a sign the seeing was not yet straight.
Sant Jñāneśvar · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī
Contemplation
There is a simple test you can apply to your own judgments, and it does not require you to wait until your mind feels uncertain. A rajasic intellect can be very articulate; it can argue its case beautifully and still be bent. The bend comes from your own likes and dislikes. So watch for the moment when your sense of what is right happens to line up perfectly with what you want, and when your sense of what is wrong happens to fall on whatever costs you a comfort. When the same duty that is plainly binding for someone else in your place quietly becomes 'not really mine to do,' that is the tell. The honest question is whether your judgment reports the matter as it actually stands, regardless of your own stake in it, or whether it reports the matter as it stands for your advantage. Hold your conclusions up against that test, and the truth-telling intellect can begin to surface from under the one that is merely clever.
Sit with this · Swami Ramsukhdas
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