Krishna
अधर्मं धर्ममिति या मन्यते तमसाऽऽवृता । सर्वार्थान्विपरीतांश्च बुद्धिः सा पार्थ तामसी ॥
adharmaṃ dharmamiti yā manyate tamasā''vṛtā | sarvārthānviparītāṃśca buddhiḥ sā pārtha tāmasī ||
The intellect that, wrapped in darkness, takes adharma to be dharma, and sees all things upside down, O son of Pritha, is tamasic.
Explanation Krishna is describing the three kinds of intellect, the faculty of discernment (buddhi), according to the three strands of nature (guṇa). Having just described the rajasic intellect, which judges dharma and adharma wrongly, he now describes the tamasic one. Its darkness (tamas) is so complete that it reverses right and wrong and misreads everything else too.
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About the Bhagavad Gita
The Bhagavad Gita, in Sanskrit श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता (Śrīmad Bhagavad Gītā ), “the song of the Lord”, is a dialogue of 18 chapters and 700 verses from the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. On the battlefield of Kurukshetra, as the war is about to begin, the warrior Arjuna loses heart at the thought of fighting his own kin, and his charioteer Krishna answers him: on duty, on acting without attachment to the results, on knowledge, meditation and devotion. Sanjaya recounts the conversation to the blind king Dhritarashtra. The name is also written Bhagwad Gita, Bhagvad Gita, Bhagavat Gita or Bhagavad Geeta; with the honorific, Shrimad Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavad Gita or Shrimad Bhagwat Geeta; and often simply the Gita or Geeta.
Every verse is here in the original Sanskrit, with a Roman (IAST) transliteration, a plain-language translation and a short explanation, in English, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, French and Tamil. The translations were made from the Sanskrit for this site and reviewed; they follow no published translation. Reading is free, with no account or advertising, and your progress stays in your browser. The verses are numbered 1.1 to 18.78, 701 in all, counting the question that opens chapter 13.
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