TAPAS

TAPAS Although the root meaning of tapas is "heat," this versatile term can indicate creative cosmic energy, sexual fervor and chastity, ecstasy and pain, contemplative ardor and austerity, self-promotion and self-mortification. It held diverse meanings already in the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda before becoming the key feature of asceticism in Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, yoga, other philosophical systems, and in regional epics beyond the Mah?bh?rata and R?m?ya?a. Ecstatic and shamanic experiences associated with fire and heat in West and South Asia may be far older than the Vedas, as are Proto-Indo-European mythic and epic motifs of heated battle fury that rises in warrior gods and heroes. In the Rig Veda, Indra defeats Vritra with the weapon of tapas; ritual soma is empowered by tapas; ancient Rishis first envisioned the Vedas by cultivating tapas; ancestor-fathers (pitris) gained heaven by tapas; and the great gods of fire and sun, Agni and S?rya, are natural reservoirs of tapas. In the tenth and latest book of the Rig Veda, hymns 129 and 190 separately diagram cosmogony: precosmic tapas is succeeded by desire (k?ma), mind (manas), order (rita), and truth (satya). A famous passage in Atharva Veda 11.5 proclaims that a student learning the Vedas generates tapas that infuses the universe, including all its gods. Like the sun, he is a reservoir of productive tapas.

Br?hma?as that follow the earliest Vedas feature Praj?pati, famous as source of creation, Lord of Creatures, and successor to self-sacrificing Purusha, conceiving by desire born of heat. Giving up his body, as did Purusha, Praj?pati exhausts himself through self-heating in order to create by repeated emission. His tapas may last for a millennium. The human sacrificer identifies with both Praj?pati and his sacrificial fire (Agni) in a similar ritualized striving that simultaneously maintains the world and transcends it. The Upanishads provide further nuances to these homologies between inner and cosmic heat. With the emergence of the Sanskrit epics and Pur??as, and developing traditions of yoga and tantra, a wide-ranging pattern of ascetic practices is apparent. A tapasvin, one who cultivates tapas, usually through a solitary forest or mountain vigil, may be a celibate yogin or yogin?, god or goddess, rishi or his wife, king, demon, child, or even an animal. Tapas can be positive, yielding drought-ending rains, for example, or negative, producing heat that melts mountains and dries up oceans. Countless myths begin with a world threatened by an uncontrollable ascetic, demon, or deity whose silent tapas has the destructive power of a raging forest fire.

Tapas has a considerable role to play in Patañjali's Yoga S?tras, its commentaries, and succeeding traditions. Three practices in kriy?-yoga are necessary to gain sam?dhi: self-study, devotion, and tapas that yields perfection (siddhi) of the body and senses. Perhaps it is in Jainism that tapas has its most vigorous adepts today. Both lay and monastic disciplines declare an increasingly rigorous program of austerities—fasting, meditation, chastity—necessary to burn off the impurities of existing karma, as in the burning of sin (p?pman) by tapas recommended in the Upanishads more than twenty-five centuries ago.

David M. Knipe

See alsoAgni ; Hinduism (Dharma) ; Indra ; Jainism ; Soma ; Yoga

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blair, Chauncey J. Heat in the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961. Philological study of the root tap-, its derivatives, and other words for heat in the two texts.

Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. Links shamanic techniques, Brahmanic speculation, and the interior sacrifice, magical inner heat and light of yoga and tantra.

Kaelber, Walter O. Tapta M?rga. Asceticism and Initiation in Vedic India. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Particularly useful on the initiatory symbolism of tapas.

Knipe, David M. In the Image of Fire. Vedic Experiences of Heat. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975. Reviews tapas from Vedic correspondences to Dharma Sh?stras in the context of symbols of fire and the dynamics of heating and cooling in the history of religions.

O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of ?iva. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. Analyzes Pur??ic and other motifs on creative and destructive tapas and related terms; see motifs 8, 10, 18, 25, 36, 39, 45.