On True Knowledge

Somayajulu GVSRK

One should exercise self control; and ultimate peace can proceed from self realization or knowledge which is the fruits of ages of endeavour. He has to work himself upwards towards Satva dedicating all his activity and endeavour to the giver of all good and ultimately reach beyond the 3 gunas, Satwa, Rajas, and Tamas. This state beyond is the state of true knowledge and freedom.

This doctrine of gunas has the constitutive stuff of man, atleast in its ethical aspect, was not quite unknown to the thinkers and philosophers in the west, except perhaps Plato. His division of the springs of human behaviour falls into 3 main sources – desire, emotion and knowledge, would seem to be a recognition of the 3 gunas in another name and his division of man according to their powers and aptitudes and later, Aristole’s modification of it, were certainly due to a recognition of the 3 gunas. Was not Bacon too faintly thinking of the triple division of man’s character into Satvika, Rajasa and Tamasa when he distinguished “the three grades of ambition in mankind”? “The first”, he said, “was the desire to extend their power – which is vulgar and degenerate. The 2nd to extend the power of their own country which has more dignity, but not less covetousness – (the third) if a man endeavours to establish and extend the power and the domination over the universe, his ambition is nobler than the other two.”

In the same way, Spinoza was using only another language for one guna passing over into another when he talked of man’s “emotions or modifcations” as “passages or translation from a lesser state of perfection to a greater.” And look at Herbert Spencer division of knowledge into 3 kinds “knowledge of the lowest kind is unified knowledge, ‘science is partially unified knowledge, philosophy is completely unified knowledge” – as almost direct paraphrase of the Gita (XVIII, XX, XXII), describing the Satvika, Rajasa and Tamasa kinds of knowledge.

To come to more recent times Dr Henry Drummond, when he talked of “Self ISM” and  “other ISM” as the two permanent tendencies of nature – “not painted on the canvas but woven through it”, was he not describing the Rajas & Satwa gunas? Lastly is not Professor Machenzie describing the three gunas in man’s moral character when he says: “there are infact, we may say, three selves in every man. There is in this self, that is revealed in occasional impulses which we can not quite subdue, the “sin” that after all dwelleth in us. On the other hand there is the permanent character – the universe in which we habitually live and finally there is the true or rational self in which alone we feel that we can rest with satisfaction – the Divine that liveth in us and in whom we hope more and more to abide”.

Is not the last phrase almost an echo of that memorable wealth in Gita (II.45) in which Krishna asks Arjuna “Abide ever in Satwa”?

[Extracted from the Gospel of Selfless Action or the Gita according to Gandhi, translated from Gujarati by Mahadev Desai, 1939]