order, and truth, a cosmic association that served as a tem-
plate for late Vedic soteriologies as well as post-Vedic popu-
lar mythologies. Finally, the R:gveda reveals that the ancient
sages and godlike ancestors also embody this cosmic fervor,
the r:s:is sitting to perform tapas (10.109), and the pitr:s
(“ancestors”) attaining their invincible places in the heavens
by means of tapas (10.154).
It is in the Yajurveda recensions, the Atharvaveda, and
the several Bra ̄hman:as that tapas receives full recognition: the
human body becomes a metaphor of sacrificial fire and tapas
is simultaneously the means to and the experience of trans-
formation. The Vedic student (brahmaca ̄rin), according to
Atharvaveda 11.5, generates such powerful tapas that it fills
his teacher, the gods, and the three worlds. Tapas is primal
energy ready to be drawn upon by the knowledgeable, the
adept, and the aggressively self-disciplined. Praja ̄pati, lord of
creatures, continues, in the Bra ̄hman:as, the older impersonal
cosmogony involving tapas and blends with it the personal
one of self-sacrificing Purus:a (R:gveda 10.90): overcome with
desire (ka ̄ma), Praja ̄pati discharges in heated procreation, ex-
hausting himself into the substance of the universe by repeat-
ed emission. That this striving to create by self-heating pro-
vided a ritual model is clear from the many correspondences
defining the Vedic sacrificer, who maintains the created
worlds by laborious ritual (karman); he is simultaneously
identified with the sacrificial fire, Agni, and
Purus:a-Praja ̄pati, as he undergoes spiritual regeneration. The
way is now clear for ascetic technique to replicate, and in
some ways to replace, sacrificial technique. Both are perfor-
mances on an exhaustive, even painful scale: procreative on
a sexual model, yet requiring chastity; bearing personal cos-
mic fruits, results that can be stored; and burning away, by
inner heat, those impurities that are hindrances to transcen-
dent, immutable being. S ́atapatha Bra ̄hman:a 10.4.4 is an il-
lustration of the Brahmanic bond between cosmogony
through sacrifice, and transcendence (rebirth) through ascet-
ic perseverance, all declared in Praja ̄pati’s thousand-year
tapas.
The Upanis:ads further explore these mysterious connec-
tions in the heat of sexuality, hatching, ripening, digestion,
strife, grief, rage, ecstasy, and mystical vision. The way is
opened for a normative tapas practiced by every religious
seeker in the third stage (a ̄ ́srama) of life, and thus a modifica-
tion or lay version of the extreme tapas professed by the ascet-
ic bent upon world- and self-conquest. In the texts of the
Jains and Buddhists, in various traditions of yoga and Tan-
tra, and in popular myths and folklore collected in the San-
skrit epics and Pura ̄n:as, a profile emerges of ascetic tapas. By
degrees of fasting, chastity, silence, meditation, breath-
control, and difficult postures, usually practiced in solitary
vigil in forests and mountains, the yogin or tapasvin “heats
the three worlds.” His techniques include a “five-fires” posi-
tion (sitting naked between four fires beneath the midsum-
mer sun), immersing himself in a river in midwinter, and re-
maining unsheltered in monsoon rains.
The ascetic, like the sacrificer, demonstrates his interior
fire as a cosmic force capable of recreating, reordering, or dis-
missing the world. So powerful is this religious model that
much of the dramatic tension of post-Vedic mythology is
provided by world-threatening tapas produced from ascetic
ardor. Gods, goddesses, demons, kings, heroes, married
sages, celibate yogins, young children, even animals perform
tapas. The god Brahma ̄ produces by tapas; S ́iva’s tapas and
magical fire alternately create and destroy; Pa ̄rvat ̄ı maintains
tapas for 36,000 years; a host of demons (asuras and daityas)
concentrate on world domination by tapas; the Pa ̄nd:ava he-
roes exercise tapas in forest exile. Tapas and ka ̄ma cooperate
in keeping the created world together; erotic desire poses the
strongest threat to ascetic world-transcendence, and there-
fore repression and lust together with self-control and self-
abandon provide antiphonal parallels to the ancient
Indra-Vr:tra cosmic opposition, a cooperative discord that
threads the drama of creation and recreation.
Whereas Hinduism routinized tapas into ordinary ob-
servance of fasts, meditations, and yogalike practices, and
Buddhism elected a middle path between austerity and in-
dulgence, Jainism perfected tapas in both lay and monastic
careers as a means of burning off old karman and blocking
accretions of new karman. In Jainism and in some traditions
of Tantric yoga tapas survives today as disciplined self-
mortification and as an internal experience of transfor-
mation.SEE ALSO Agni; Indra.BIBLIOGRAPHY
The best contextual discussion of tapas in Brahmanic initiation,
sacrifice, cosmogony, and eschatology is by Mircea Eliade in
A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1978), esp.
pp. 220–238. See also his Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, 2d
ed. (Princeton, 1969), pp. 106–114, 330–341. Chauncey J.
Blair’s Heat in the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda (New
Haven, 1961) has analyzed the root tap, its derivatives, and
other words concerning “heat” in two Vedic texts. I discuss
the religious significance of tapas as fire and heat in the Vedic
tradition in my book In the Image of Fire: Vedic Experiences
of Heat (Delhi, 1975), esp. chaps. 4–5. In Asceticism and
Eroticism in the Mythology of S ́iva (London, 1973) Wendy
Doniger O!Flaherty provides penetrating analyses of some
forty-five motifs, primarily in the Pura ̄n:as, on creative and
destructive tapas and so forth; see motifs 8, 10, 18, 25, 36,
39, 45. On tapas in Jain monastic traditions, see Padmanabh
S. Jaini’s The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley, 1979), esp.
pp. 250–251; for lay traditions, see R. H. B. Williams’s Jaina
Yoga: A Survey of the Mediaeval S ́ra ̄vaka ̄ca ̄ras (London,
1963), pp. 238–239.
New Sources
Bronkhorst, Johannes. The Two Sources of Indian Asceticism. Bern,
1993.
Kaelber, Walter O. Tapta-Marga: Asceticism and Initiation in
Vedic India. Albany, N.Y., 1989.
Keemattam, Augusthy. The Hermits of Rishikesh: A Sociological
Study. New Delhi, 1997.8998 TAPAS