Samkhya Philosophy In
Samkhya philosophy, a is one of three "tendencies, qualities":
sattva,
rajas and
tamas. This category of qualities has been widely adopted by various schools of Hinduism for categorizing behavior and natural phenomena. The three qualities are: •
Sattva is the quality of balance, harmony, goodness, purity, universalizing, holistic, constructive, creative, building, positive attitude, luminous, serenity, being-ness, peaceful, virtuous. •
Rajas is the quality of passion, activity, neither good nor bad and sometimes either, self-centeredness, egoistic, individualizing, driven, moving, dynamic. •
Tamas is the quality of imbalance, disorder, chaos, anxiety, impure, destructive, delusion, negative, dull or inactive, apathy, inertia or lethargy, violent, vicious, ignorant. In Indian philosophy, these qualities are not considered as present in either-or fashion. Rather, everyone and everything has all three, only in different proportions and in different contexts. The living being or substance is viewed as the net result of the joint effect of these three qualities.
Bhagavad Gita The Bhagavad Gita describes
sattva as a path to liberation. It describes
sattva as superior to the other two
gunas because it brings clarity, leads to higher realms, and is without impurities, but it is also described as a cause of bondage. Verse 14.6 describes
sattva as: It causes bondage, as explained in verse 14.9, by attachment to happiness. ==Buddhism==