We decompose the tribaryon configuration in terms of SU (3) flavor and spin state and analyze their color-spin-flavor wave function following the Pauli principle. By comparing the color-color and color-spin interactions of compact tribaryon configuration against the lowest three nucleon threshold within a constituent quark model, we show that the three nucleon configurations have to be repulsive at short distance for all possible quantum numbers and all values of the SU(3) symmetry breaking parameter. Our work identifies the origin of the repulsive nuclear three body forces including the hyperons at short distance that are called for from phenomenological considerations starting from nuclear matter to the maximum mass of a neutron star. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.98.034001 The importance of three nucleon force was discussed from the early days of nuclear physics [1,2] to address nuclear configurations beyond the deuteron [3][4][5]. Phenomenologically, the long distance part of the three nuclear force is obtained using the pion mediated interactions [6,7] which gives the additional attraction necessary to fit the experimental 3 H binding energy. However, as one tries to go beyond the few body system and understand the saturation properties of nuclear matter [6,8] and the compressibility consistent with experiments [9], it becomes clear that the three body nuclear force including those involving hyperons [10] are repulsive at short distance.Recently, there is a renewed interest in the three body nuclear force as there are compelling evidences that the force should be repulsive at short distance from analyzing the extrapolated dense nuclear matter equation of state (EOS) in the neutron stars [11,12]. The naive extrapolation of two body interaction fitted to hypernuclear data leads to Λ hyperon condensation at 2 ∼ 3 times nuclear matter density in neutron stars, which leads to maximum neutron star mass of less than 1.5 M ⊙ [13]. On the other hand the recently observed neutron stars J1614-2230 [14] and J0348-0432 [15] have observed masses of ð1.97 AE 0.04ÞM ⊙ and ð2.01 AE 0.04ÞM ⊙ respectively. A natural way to solve the "hyperon puzzle" is to introduce a repulsive short distance three body force including the hyperon which becomes more important at high density and naturally leads to a stiffer equation of state and forces the hyperons to appear at a much higher density [16].In this work, we will show why the short distance part of the three nucleon interaction, including the hyperons, should be repulsive. Our calculation is based on Pauli principle and the color-color and color-spin interaction for a decomposed color-flavor-spin wave function with broken flavor SU(3). Specifically, we compare the stability of the compact tribaryon configuration against three nucleon configuration of the lowest threshold within a constituent quark picture for all possible quantum numbers. We find that for every quantum number, the tribaryon configuration is highly repulsive compared to the lowest three nucleon threshold even in the SU(...