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 18, Verse 22
Verse 22
The Yoga of Liberation through Renunciation
But that which clings to a single effect as if it were the whole, which is without rational basis, trivial, and not concerned with truth — that is declared to be tamasic.
Context & Meaning
Tamasic knowledge is the most contracted form of knowing: it takes one limited object and treats it as the whole of reality. It is akaitukam — without proper cause or rational foundation — and atattvārthavat — not concerned with truth, indifferent to what is real. It is alpa — small, petty, limited in scope. This is the knowledge of superstition, of blind routine, of the person whose entire horizon has collapsed to one immediate and narrow concern. It is also the knowledge of the ideologue who has taken one partial truth and made it absolute — or the addict who has reduced the entire field of value to one object of craving. Tamasic knowledge does not see; it is a form of not-seeing dressed in the clothing of knowledge.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainAdi Shankaracharya
AdvaitaKṛtsnavadeckasmin — treating one thing as if it were the whole. The Advaita teaching identifies this as the root structure of māyā — the cosmic illusion that takes the partial for the total, the relative for the absolute, the conditioned for the unconditioned. Tamasic knowledge is this same structure operating at the individual level: a person whose entire knowing has contracted around one small object, one routine, one habit, one fear — unable to see beyond it. The prescription is not more knowledge of the tamasic kind but the radical opening of awareness that is the first movement toward sattva.