सत्त्वं रजस्तम इति गुणाः प्रकृतिसंभवाः।निबध्नन्ति महाबाहो देहे देहिनमव्ययम्॥
sattvaṃ rajas tama iti guṇāḥ prakṛti-sambhavāḥnibadhnanti mahā-bāho dehe dehinam avyayam
Word by word
The verse says
Clarity, drive and heaviness — these three strands, born of nature, bind the one who lives in a body, though that one does not perish.
In plain words
The three are named: sattva, rajas, tamas.
Clarity, drive, heaviness. They are not good, better and worst — that reading comes later and is complicated.
And the verb is nibadhnanti — they bind. All three of them.
Where you've felt this · in health
Three days in the same week. On Monday everything is clear and you get the hard thing done. On Wednesday you are busy from seven until nine and could not say what you did. On Friday you cannot start anything and you go to bed early. You are the same person in all three.
Going deeper
All three strands bind, including the good one, and that is the detail the whole chapter turns on.
The obvious reading would be that clarity is the goal and the other two are problems. The verb in this verse rules that out before the chapter starts. Sattva binds. Whatever clarity is, it is not freedom, and verse 6 will say precisely how it holds people.
That is unusual. Most moral systems have a top state they are recommending.
What this chapter recommends instead is getting out from under all three, which is the subject of its last eight verses. Until then, everything being described — including everything a reader would want to be — is being described as a kind of binding, and that framing is deliberate.