The seventeenth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita runs the world through its three-quality analysis, faith, food, sacrifice, austerity, and when it reaches giving, it produces the classical Indian anatomy of the gift. The sattvika gift, pure, luminous, is given because giving is right: datavyam iti, with the thought simply that it ought to be given, at the proper place and time, to a worthy recipient, from whom nothing is expected in return. The rajasika gift, passionate, is the one that keeps accounts: given to get something back, or for the fruit it will earn, or grudgingly, with the cost felt. The tamasika gift, dark, manages to corrupt generosity itself: the wrong place and time, an unworthy object, and above all the manner, without respect, with contempt for the receiver.
The analysis is notable for what it makes decisive. Not the size of the gift, which the verses never mention; not the donor's wealth; but the interior configuration of the act, its freedom from return-seeking and its regard for the receiver's dignity. The insistence on a worthy recipient, patra, gave later Hindu thought a whole casuistry of merit-fields, and the requirement of respect made the manner of giving a moral fact as weighty as the substance. Every subsequent Indian discussion of charity, Hindu, Buddhist or Jain, works in the shadow of this triage, and its unsentimental point survives translation into any economy: a gift can fail as a gift while succeeding as a transfer.