Lord Krishna

Divine Teacher

The 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 13

Verse 13

The Yoga of the Three Types of Faith

Sacrifice performed without scriptural prescription, without food distribution, without sacred chanting, without gifts to priests, and without faith — that is declared to be tamasic.

Context & Meaning

The tamasic sacrifice is defined by what is absent rather than what is present: vidhi-hīna (without scriptural method — conducted randomly, carelessly), asṛṣṭa-anna (without the distribution of food — the sharing that is essential to yajña's communal dimension), mantra-hīna (without sacred chanting — the vibrational dimension that consecrates the act), adakṣiṇa (without the appropriate offerings to officiants — the acknowledgment of those who transmit sacred knowledge), and śraddhā-virahita (without faith — the essential inner quality that makes any outer act spiritually alive). This is ritual as hollow performance — or, more accurately, ritual as the absence of ritual. The form is maintained without any of its animating content.

Scholar Commentaries

1 commentary · Public domain

Adi Shankaracharya

Advaita

Śraddhā-virahitam — devoid of faith. This is the definitive mark of the tamasic sacrifice. Without faith, all the other elements — the method, the food, the mantras, the offerings — are inert. Faith is what makes a ritual act genuinely sacred; without it, the most elaborate ceremony is merely elaborate. The tamasic type goes through the motions without the inner engagement that would give those motions meaning. This is perhaps the most poignant form of spiritual poverty: the loss not of the form but of the life within the form.