The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

╭ chapter three
Krishna knows that Arjuna is not the type to disengage himself
and go off on a search for the mystical vision. For Arjuna,
the active life is essential.
The danger, of course, of a life of active engagement in
the world is that Arjuna will get caught up in his actions and
begin to act out of selfish motives. If this were to happen, he
would be doomed to spiritual failure.
Having a good deal of self-knowledge, Arjuna senses this
danger. He asks Krishna a fundamental question: What power
binds us to our selfish ways? Even if we wish to act rightly, so
often we do the wrong thing. What power moves us?
Krishna replies that anger and selfish desire are our greatest
enemies. They are the destructive powers that can compel
us to wander away from our purpose, to end up in self-delusion
and despair.
Here it is necessary to introduce two technical terms from
Hindu philosophy. The Gita is not an academic work of philosophy,
but a poetic, practical text. Still, it does refer from
time to time to Sankhya, one of the six traditional schools
of Indian philosophy. In Sankhya, the phenomenal world of
mind and matter is described as having three basic qualities or
gunas : sattva – goodness, light, purity; rajas – passion, activity,
energy; and tamas – darkness, ignorance, inertia. According
to Sankhya, spiritual evolution progresses from tamas to rajas
to sattva, and final liberation takes the soul beyond the three
gunas altogether.
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