Lord Krishna
Divine TeacherThe Supreme Lord, the charioteer and divine guide of Arjuna. Krishna delivers the eternal wisdom of the Gita, revealing the nature of the soul, duty, and the path to liberation.
Speaking: Chapter 17, Verse 10
Verse 10
The Yoga of the Three Types of Faith
Food that is stale, tasteless, putrid, decomposed, left over, and impure — such food is dear to the tamasic.
Context & Meaning
The tamasic diet is defined by decay and impurity: yāta-yāma (cooked too long ago, stale), gata-rasa (with the life-force gone from it), pūti (putrid, malodorous), paryuṣita (decomposed, left overnight), ucchiṣṭa (leftovers, what others have abandoned), and amedhya (ritually or physically impure). This diet describes not just specific foods but an orientation toward nourishment: the tamasic person is not invested in the quality, freshness, or purity of what they consume. They eat whatever is available with minimal discrimination. The connection to tamas — inertia, dullness, heaviness — is direct: food stripped of vitality produces a being stripped of vitality.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainAdi Shankaracharya
AdvaitaThe tamasic diet is not merely unhealthy by conventional standards — it reflects and reinforces a deeper orientation of consciousness: indifferent to quality, unaware of the effects of what one consumes, satisfied with what is left over and discarded. This indifference is itself a symptom of tamas — the guṇa of inertia that makes discrimination feel like too much effort. The result is a feedback loop: the tamasic diet deepens tamas, which further reduces the capacity for discrimination, which leads to more tamasic choices.