The Yoga of the Threefold Faith

Arjuna opens chapter seventeen with a question the previous chapter provoked. What is the standing of people who sacrifice with faith but set aside the injunctions of scripture? The chapter has just made scripture the measure of conduct, and he wants to know where sincere but irregular practice falls.

The answer relocates the question. The faith of embodied beings is of three kinds, born of their own nature, and it is threefold according to whether clarity, energy or inertia predominates. The faith of each person, the chapter says, conforms to their essential character; a person is made of faith, and whatever their faith is, that is what they are.

That last statement is unusually strong. It does not say that people have faith or lack it, or that faith is correct or mistaken. It says faith is constitutive, and that its colour follows the constitution of the person holding it. Those of clarity worship the gods, those of energy worship spirits of power and wealth, those of inertia worship the departed and hosts of the dead. The classification is descriptive and it is not framed as a moral condemnation of the third group, although the chapter is clearly ranking them.

What makes this chapter valuable to a reference work is that it is the Gita's most direct treatment of religious diversity within a single society. It does not explain the varieties of worship by doctrine, by revelation or by error. It explains them by temperament, and it holds that a person cannot simply adopt a different faith by deciding to, since the faith follows the nature and the nature is what practice slowly changes.

Having divided faith three ways, chapter seventeen applies the same division to four ordinary areas of life, and the result is the most domestic passage in the Gita.

Food comes first. Those of clarity prefer food that is juicy, smooth, firm and pleasant, promoting life, vitality, strength, health and satisfaction. Those of energy want food that is bitter, sour, salty, very hot, pungent, dry and burning, producing pain, grief and sickness. Those of inertia take food that is stale, tasteless, putrid, left overnight and unfit for offering. A commentary on diet in a book about the battlefield seems like a detour until one notices the chapter's claim: the strands are legible in the most ordinary preferences a person has.

Sacrifice, austerity and giving follow the same pattern. Austerity is further divided by where it is exercised. Bodily austerity is reverence, purity, uprightness and non-injury. Austerity of speech is language that causes no distress, is truthful, agreeable and beneficial, together with the practice of recitation. Austerity of mind is calmness, gentleness, silence, self control and purity of being. Austerity performed for show, to gain honour or reverence, is placed with energy; austerity undertaken with self torture or to harm another is placed with inertia.

Giving is sorted by whether it is given because it should be, to a fitting recipient who cannot return it, or grudgingly and with expectation of return, or at the wrong place and time to an unworthy person without respect. The chapter closes with the three syllables used in the tradition to open and dedicate a religious act, and with the flat statement that anything offered without faith counts for nothing, here or hereafter.