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 27
Verse 27
The Yoga of Liberation through Renunciation
Passionate, desiring the fruits of action, greedy, violent in nature, impure, moved by joy and grief — such an agent is declared to be rajasic.
Context & Meaning
The rajasic agent is characterised by a cluster of qualities that form a recognisable psychological type: rāgī (passionate, driven by desire), karmaphala-prepsuh (constantly seeking the fruits of action), lubdha (greedy), hiṃsātmaka (prone to violence in nature — not necessarily physical violence but the inner aggression of ego that hurts others in the pursuit of its goals), aśuci (impure — allowing any means to justify the desired end), and swinging between harṣa (elation at success) and śoka (grief at failure). The rajasic agent is the person trapped in the drama of their own results — up when things go well, down when they don't, never at rest, always in motion between hope and disappointment.
Scholar Commentaries
1 commentary · Public domainMadhvacharya
DvaitaHarṣaśokānvitaḥ — moved by joy and grief. The Dvaita reading sees this emotional volatility as the precise index of the rajasic condition: the person who is up when they succeed and down when they fail has made their results the source of their identity and therefore their wellbeing. They are held hostage by their outcomes. The way out is not to stop caring about outcomes but to reorient the source of one's identity from results to relationship with God. When Vishnu — not success or failure — is the ground of one's being, the results can come and go without destabilising the soul.