Sanskrit
यया धर्ममधर्मं च कार्यं चाकार्यमेव च । अयथावत्प्रजानाति बुद्धिः सा पार्थ राजसी ॥ ३१ ॥
yayā dharmam adharmaṃ ca kāryaṃ cākāryam eva ca ayathāvat prajānāti buddhiḥ sā pārtha rājasī
Translation
That by which one understandeth away Right and Wrong and also what ought to be done and what ought not to be done, that Reason, O Partha, is passionate.
Annie Besant · The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Annie Besant (4th ed., 1922) — Wikisource · Public Domain
Explanation
Rajasic buddhi mistakes dharma for adharma and confuses what should and shouldn’t be done — not through inversion exactly, but through unreliable discrimination that gets the boundary wrong in a shifting, inconsistent way. Paired with verse 30, this defines rajas here as noise rather than malice: the rajasic intellect isn’t committed to wrongdoing, it’s just untrustworthy. Rājasic buddhi grasps right and wrong ayathāvat, “not as they are” — it has the categories but reads them through desire, so its judgments are distorted rather than absent.
Study deeper
Word by word
- yayā dharmam adharmaṃ caयया धर्मं अधर्मं च
- that by which dharma and adharma (yayā + dharmam + adharmam + ca)
- kāryaṃ cākāryam eva caकार्यं चाकार्यं एव च
- and what is to be done and not done (kāryam + ca + akāryam + eva + ca)
- ayathāvat prajānātiअयथावत् प्रजानाति
- one knows wrongly (ayathāvat + prajānāti)
- buddhiḥ sā pārtha rājasīबुद्धिः सा पार्थ राजसी
- that intellect, O Pārtha, is rājasic (buddhiḥ + sā + pārtha + rājasī)
Commentary
Site Commentary
Verse 30 says sattvic buddhi knows, vetti, the true divisions; this verse doesn’t say rajasic buddhi fails to know them at all — it says it understands them not as they really are, ayathavat. The rajasic mind isn’t blank on right and wrong, it has a confidently held answer that happens to be miscalibrated, which is exactly why this kind of confusion is harder to catch than plain ignorance would be.
Original commentary written for this site · © Amit Singh — original commentary
Apply this verse
Lessons
Personal
- Notice that your most confidently held judgments can be systematically miscalibrated rather than simply absent — build in a periodic audit of your own calibration, not just a check on what you do or don't know.
Professional
- A confidently wrong call, on incident severity, on priority, is more dangerous than an admitted unknown because no one thinks to double-check it; build review steps that test calibration on confident answers, not only knowledge gaps.
Family & Social
- A family member who's confidently, repeatedly wrong about the same recurring issue isn't lacking information — address why their read keeps miscalibrating, not just what the correct answer is this time.
Ask yourself
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