I love words. I love writing words, thinking about words, and researching the etymology of words to understand how they developed. For example, did you ever look at the word triangle and notice that tri means three, so three angles form a triangle? Did you know that disgruntled is the opposite of gruntled, which means pleased or satisfied? So, then, disgruntled and displeased are similar opposites to gruntled and pleased? Did you know that goodbye used be the short from of “God be with you”? In the study of language, there are many lightbulb moments that bring special significance to our lives.
I also love learning about words in other languages that do not have direct translations in English. Language is not just a set of arbitrary phonetics used to describe the world. Language is a way of thinking–a way of understanding the world and humanity’s role in it. Language reflects a distinct way of being. Because of this, English has already directly adopted many concepts and words from other languages rather than translating them. Words like yoga, feng shui, schadenfreude, prima donna, pro bono, bon voyage, and karma are used in common parlance without a second thought.
And, so, one of my favorite Sanskrit words to learn about is the word tapas. And no, tapas does not refer to small plates of delicious Spanish food. Tapas is a deeply rich, philosophically complex, and spiritually inspiring concept that is found across yogic, Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. There is much to learn about tapas–from its variety of meanings and the different ways it is used. The deeper we go into the word tapas, the more meaning we find; the more we implement tapas into our own life, the more we can grow and understand ourselves.
Tapas can mean different things depending on the context in which it is used, but, rather than being wholly separate meanings, they are all deeply connected. Let’s look into some of those meanings and how we might apply them to our lives.
Discipline
One literal meaning of the word tapas is discipline. To truly understand what discipline means, however, we again have to return to the etymology of words. When most people think of discipline, they might imagine punishment meant to encourage socially acceptable behavior. A few decades ago, teachers might hit their students with a ruler if they were not paying attention, or a parent might put soap in a child’s mouth as punishment for saying “dirty” words. The idea of discipline as a kind of punishment has its origins in medieval times, with the chastisement or self-mortification that Christians performed to “repent.”
But, if we go further back in time, we learn that the word discipline does not imply inflicting pain and punishment. It actually derives from the same word as disciple, which is used the way we use the term student today, i.e., Plato was a disciple of Socrates. In this way, disciple comes from the Latin term disciplina, meaning instruction or knowledge. So, the idea of tapas is more closely related to the discipline one needs in order to truly learn.
In other words, if we are to gain knowledge and wisdom in this world, we must first establish some discipline in our practices. For example, if students are noisily running around the room, they will not learn much from their teacher at the front of the class. The students first need discipline–the ability to sit down at their desks and pay attention–in order to learn.
We, too, can apply the attitude of tapas to our yoga and meditation practices anytime we sit onto a meditation cushion or step onto our yoga mats. We have to sit in one place in order to gain wisdom. This fact taps us into another truth we find about tapas: just having the discipline to be still will naturally make us wise. Only by sitting and being still can we get in touch with the wisdom that lies within each and every one of us.
There are few ideas more important on the spiritual path than the idea that there is an innate source of wisdom within each of us. This is why we say namaste, another Sanskrit word which can be translated to, “I honor that place in you of truth and wisdom.” This assertion is repeated again and again across different practices and religions. Ralph Waldo Emerson famous wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us,” and St. Augustine too once said, “Do not go outside, return to within yourself; truth dwells in the inner man.”
The idea of tapas teaches us that, to get in touch with the truth of who we are and the truth of reality, we need discipline. Tapas also teaches us that the path there is deeply challenging, requiring incredible gumption. This brings us to another definition of tapas: fire.
Fire
Another way to translate and think about the word tapas is fire, which opens up even more ways to think about what it means to cultivate wisdom in our lives. Fire can, of course, refer to one’s motivation, just as an artist or athlete might have a burning fire within them. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Henepola Gunaratana uses the word gumption to refer to the energy, “grit, determination and discipline” required to sit for hours at a time and cultivate mindfulness.
But, what happens when we bring a lot of motivation to our practice? We meet resistance, we meet friction, and an internal heat begins to occur. Just as holding a challenging physical posture will heat the muscles and the body, any kind of wisdom discipline will heat the mind. Just sitting in meditation for twenty minutes for example, a practitioner might experience the burning desire to get up and check their email. As the mind reaches and grasps for things to hold onto, we might experience anger within ourselves. But still, we use tapas to discipline the mind and let those temporary urges go.
In this way, fire also means purification. In the same way a yoga teacher might say that “pain is weakness leaving the body,” the fire of tapas also has the capacity to remove impurities inside ourselves. Just as you would put a clay pot into a kiln to harden it or a raw metal into a fire to burn off any impurities, so, too, a genuine spiritual practice will have some internal difficulty to burn off the impurities of hatred, ill-will, and egotism.
The great sage Patanjali confirms this perspective when he first refers to tapas in sutra 2.43, writing, “Elimination of impurities from the mind by ascetic practice leads to the realization of the full potential of the body and the senses.” Commentaries on this sutra will point out that just as we lose weight by burning fat, we burn away past conditioning of the mind through yoga and meditation.
Think about it–what activities in your life produce great fire in you? Quite surprisingly, this includes both ends of the emotional spectrum. You might experience fiery, passionate love for someone. You might also feel red-hot anger. And, of course, if you stick our hand into the fire, you will immediately experience a lot of pain. Interestingly, all of these references are found in the ancient scriptures that describe tapas. In the Jāiminiya-Upanisad Brāhmaņa for example, life itself is perpetuated by tapas, as it is sexual heat and desire that keeps our species going. This idea is also intimately connected to the fact that life requires warmth itself; just as a hen must keep her eggs warm, the Atharva Veda says that all earthly life was created from the sun’s tapas.
This brings us to another incredibly important formulation of the word tapas: the ability to tolerate suffering and the ability to impose austerities upon oneself.
The Ability to Tolerate Sufferings
I have been writing a lot recently about the important role that suffering plays in our lives and our spiritual awakening. And I have found, again and again, that our capacity to be with suffering is directly related to our progress along the spiritual path. From Thich Nhat Hanh’s famous quip, “No mud, no lotus,” to the poet Jane Hirschfield’s observation that “suffering leads us to beauty the way thirst leads us to water,” I have continually found that suffering taps us directly into finding greater meaning and happiness in our lives.
In some of the earliest texts referring to the word tapas, it refers to the heat necessary for biological birth. Childbirth might be the most quintessential example of a time in life when we must undergo intense suffering in order to get something we what. Birth is also an incredible metaphor for a human’s ability to bring something new into the world and how it often requires a lot of struggle. If you want to start a business, you might have to endure years of uncertainty and hard work. If you want to lose weight, you will need tapas to avoid eating unhealthy foods and to stick to your exercise regime.
Vedic scholars have extended the metaphor of human birth to the idea of hatching new bodies of knowledge. In the ancient yogic texts, tapas is also described as the process that led to the spiritual birth of rishis– sages of spiritual insights. This idea reflects how, at certain times in life, we are also reborn into newer, better versions of ourselves. The incredible writer Anaïs Nin was the one who observed the pain of necessary growth, writing: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Similarly, the practices of tapas show us the earliest forms of modern postural yoga, where ancient practitioners would challenge themselves to be in challenging positions for many hours or days at a time. As Daniel Simpson writes in The Truth of Yoga, when Alexander the Great invaded India,
Greek historians describe how his army witnessed “fifteen men standing in different postures, sitting or lying down naked” under the baking Punjab sun. Another man, who came to visit Alexander, stood on one leg, with a piece of wood three feet in length raised in both hands where one leg was fatigued he changed to support the other, and thus continued the whole day.
If spending hours in the equivalent of tree pose sounds excessive, try twelve years… Some practitioners never sit down, sleeping slumped on a swing, others stand on one leg or hold an arm in the air.
Daniel also points out the more recent example of Amar Bharati, who, in 1973, chose to raise his hand and hold it up for the rest of his life in order to show his faith and appreciation towards Shiva. After two years of pain, he eventually lost all feeling in his arm as the connective tissue hardened it in place.
Amar’s intense spiritual exercise taps us into the true meaning of tapas: to become closer to God. It was Richard Rohr who wrote, “There are two ways to God. One is through intense love. One is through intense suffering.” So if suffering brings us to God, our ability to tolerate sufferings reflects how close we might be able to get to the divine. For that, we need tapas. I love the idea that we find God through suffering a lot, so will continue to explore it in future blog posts.
Conclusion
Learning about words is fascinating. It’s also endless. One word can be described with a few other words, and each of those words can mean even more words, and so on. The exploration of tapas is just like that; it is a practice that continues to grow and bear fruit. Tapas can mean heat, warmth, shine, and burning. It can mean to suffer and the ability to suffer. It can mean the discipline needed to become wise.
So, the next time you are in meditation, a challenging yoga pose, or any challenging situation in your life, feel free to apply the attitude of tapas to that moment, recognizing the strength necessary to overcome the challenge and realizing that difficulties are actually fuel for growth.
