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Updated: June 10, 2025
The word means literally heat, hence pain or toil, and some think that its origin should be sought in practices which produced fever, or tended to concentrate heat in the body. One object of Tapas is to obtain abnormal powers by the suppression of desires or the endurance of voluntary tortures. There is an element of truth in this aspiration.
Did a dress need repairing, the edges of the rent were moistened and beaten together, or a handful of fiber was beaten in as a patch. Often for fishermen the tapas were made water-proof by added thicknesses and the employment of gums, and waterproof cloth for wrappings was made thick and impervious to rain as the oilcloth it resembled.
Temperance, chastity and mental concentration are great aids for increasing the force of thought and will. The Hindu believes that intensity and perseverance in this road of abstinence and rapture will yield correspondingly increased results. But this is only the beginning of Tapas.
It grieved Maui to see his mother's tapa so often spoiled, so he besought the Sun to go more slowly. For one or two days he did moderate his pace and Hina rejoiced in the lovely tapas she was able to make. But soon the heedless Sun hurried past again as fast as ever, entirely forgetting his promise to Maui.
The lowest castes can by this process acquire a position which makes them equal to the highest . Of the non-Brahmanic sects, the Jains set the highest value on Tapas, but chiefly as a purification of the soul and a means of obtaining an unearthly state of pure knowledge . In theory the Buddha rejected it; he taught a middle way, rejecting alike self-indulgence and self-mortification.
In Tennyson he may be guessed to represent the fabled esoteric lore of old religions, with their vague pantheisms, and such magic as the tapas of Brahmanic legends. He is wise with a riddling evasive wisdom: the builder of Camelot, the prophet, a shadow of Druidry clinging to the Christian king.
Eighty feet in length, rising two stories and a half from masonry walls to tree-trunked roof, flung across with a flying gallery from the rail of which hung skins of wild animals, hand-woven blankets of Oaxaca and Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from the islands of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was a feast-hall of some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant sense of lack of the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and silver above the salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath for bones.
The creative deities are said to have produced the world by Tapas, just as they are said to have produced it by sacrifice and Hindu mythology abounds in stories of ascetics who became so mighty that the very gods were alarmed. For instance Râvaṇa, the Demon ruler of Lanka who carried off Sîtâ, had acquired his power by austerities which enabled him to extort a boon from Brahmâ.
As to the danger of infection to a foreign visitor, there is absolutely none, unless he should undertake to live in native fashion among the natives, smoking out of their pipes, sleeping under their tapas, and eating their food with them; and even in such an extreme case his risk would be very slight now, so thoroughly has the disease been "stamped out" by the energetic action of Mr.
Tapas, that is asceticism or self-mortification, holds in the religious thought and practice of India as large a place as sacrifice. We hear of it as early, for it is mentioned in the Rig Veda , and it lasts longer, for it is a part of contemporary Hinduism just as much as prayer or worship.
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