Kama
kāma
Desire, appetite, craving. When Arjuna asks what drives man to evil *"as if by some foreign force,"* Krishna answers: it is *kāma*. In the *Bhagavad-Gītā*, desire is not a neutral lack to be filled but a devouring power, the enemy of knowledge, which clouds judgment and chains the soul to its objects.
C’est l’amour, c’est la passion, née des Ténèbres ; elle est dévorante, pleine de péché ; sache qu’elle est une ennemie ici-bas.
Burnouf renders kāma as “love” and “passion,” two words that, in nineteenth-century French, encompassed sensory appetite and covetousness. The context is unambiguous: Arjuna has just asked by what force a man is “driven into sin against his will.” Desire is thus presented from the outset as a power that acts despite us, not as a choice.
The following verses sketch its portrait. Desire “clouds knowledge,” “shifts form at will,” and holds dominion over “the senses, the mind, the reason.” Krishna compares it to smoke veiling flame, to rust on a mirror. Hence the remedy, which is not deliberation but mastery: “bind your senses from the start, and destroy this sinful thing that steals knowledge.”
To be distinguished from karma, action: kāma is what taints action by mixing in the expectation of a reward. The desire negated in nishkama-karma is precisely this kāma—not every impulse of the soul, but the craving for results. It must also be distinguished from desire as understood in gradual purification paths: the Gītā does not propose refining desire but cutting it off, for it regards it as the very enemy of liberation.