Tejas

This divine radiance is called tejas in Sanskrit, and Sri Krishna is telling us here that this same light is within everyone, and it is the same radiance in the sun, in the stars, as in us all.

Easwaran identifies Tejas as the Sanskrit name for the divine luminosity that kundalinī becomes after its completed descent, equating it with the universal inner light declared by Krishna to pervade all beings and all cosmic bodies.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis

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Tejas, for example, is not really ‘fire’ but something more like ‘brightness’ or ‘brilliance of light.’ It is a quality of perception, dominant in the mind-form we make and call a fire.

Easwaran redefines Tejas epistemologically as a perceptual quality rather than a physical substance, arguing it names the luminous character of a cognitive act and accommodates contemporary scientific thought by treating the knower as inseparable from the known.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975thesis

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Pañca mahābhūtas – Five Great Elements: Ākāśa = ether, Vāyu = air, Tejas = fire, Jala = water, Pṛthvī = earth.

Singh situates Tejas within the formal tattva schema of Kashmir Shaivism as the third of the five gross elements, providing the canonical ontological framework within which all more specific treatments of the term operate.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting

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tejasā sūryadipāder- ākāśe śabalīkṛte / dṛṣṭirniveśyā tatraiva svātmarūpaṃ prakāśate

Singh presents a Vijñāna Bhairava dhāraṇā in which the practitioner concentrates upon luminosity—solar, stellar, or the flame of a lamp—as a means of entering samādhi, deploying Tejas as a practical contemplative support for the disclosure of the Self.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting

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Tanmātras sequentially produce the five mahābhūtas (gross elements).

Bryant’s glossary contextualizes the mahābhūta series—of which Tejas is a member—within the Sāṃkhya-Yoga framework by tracing their derivation from the five tanmātras, the subtle elemental essences.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009aside

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