Tamas

Tamas is, in the Samkhya philosophy and the Bhagavad Gita, the third of the three gunas, the strand of inertia, darkness, heaviness and dullness, the quality of resistance, obscurity, sleep and decay, that which conceals and weighs down. In the threefold analysis of nature it is the principle of stability at its densest and of the veiling of knowledge, associated with ignorance, lethargy, delusion and the downward pull toward the inert.

The Bhagavad Gita describes tamasic food, action and temperament as those marked by dullness, negligence and confusion, and it presents tamas as binding the soul through heedlessness and sloth. Yet like the others it has its necessary place, for it is the ground of rest, of matter's persistence and of the form that holds things together; the three gunas are always found in combination, and it is their shifting balance that constitutes all of manifest nature. The aim of the spiritual path is to rise through and finally beyond the three. The doctrine is ancient and central to Hindu thought.

Sources Classical Samkhya: An Interpretation of Its History and MeaningGerald James Larson with Srimad-Bhagavad-Gita, English translation and commentarySwami Swarupananda

In the Bhagavad Gita's seventeenth chapter the threefold guna classification extends to food, and tamasic food is described as stale, tasteless, putrid or left over, favoured, the text says, by those given to dullness and inertia. The same grid marks giving made without respect, at the wrong time or place, or to an unworthy recipient as tamasic, and an action undertaken from delusion, without regard for consequence, as tamasic in character, extending the guna into an ethical as well as a dietary vocabulary.

Tamas is not simply condemned as evil in this scheme; rest, sleep and the stillness that allows recovery are tamasic in nature and necessary in their season, and the classical view holds that no person or substance is purely tamasic, since all three gunas are always present together in shifting proportion. Spiritual practice generally aims to lessen tamas relative to sattva and rajas, treating excessive inertia, confusion and negligence as the obstacle most in need of reduction on the way toward the transcendence of all three gunas together, called gunatita.

Popular use sometimes treats tamas as a simple synonym for laziness, losing the doctrine's more exact claim that tamas is one necessary strand among three, present in everyone, rather than a flaw confined to some people and absent in others.