and has intelligence (kaitanya) for its quality. And to be essentially
intelligent means to be self-luminous. There are many scriptural texts
declaring this, compare e.g. 'As a mass of salt has neither inside nor
outside but is altogether a mass of taste, thus indeed that Self has
neither inside nor outside but is altogether a mass of knowledge' (Bri.
Up. IV, 5, 13); 'There that person becomes self-luminous, there is no
destruction of the knowing of the knower' (Bri. Up. IV, 3, 14; 30); 'He
who knows, let me smell this, he is the Self (Ch. Up. VIII, 12, 4); 'Who
is that Self? That one who is made of knowledge, among the pranas,
within the heart, the light, the person' (Bri. Up. IV, 3, 7); 'For it is
he who sees, hears, smells, tastes, thinks, considers, acts, the person
whose Self is knowledge' (Pr. Up. IV, 9); 'Whereby should one know the
knower' (Bri. Up. IV, 5, 15). 'This person knows,' 'The seer does not
see death nor illness nor pain' (Ch. Up. VII, 26, 2); 'That highest
person not remembering this body into which he was born' (Ch. Up. VIII,
12, 3); 'Thus these sixteen parts of the spectator that go towards the
person; when they have readied the person, sink into him' (Pr. Up. VI,
5); 'From this consisting of mind, there is different an interior Self
consisting of knowledge' (Taitt. Up. II, 4). And the Sutrakara also will
refer to the Self as a 'knower' in II, 3, 18. All which shows that the
self-luminous Self is a knower, i.e. a knowing subject, and not pure
light (non-personal intelligence). In general we may say that where
there is light it must belong to something, as shown by the light of a
lamp. The Self thus cannot be mere consciousness. The grammarians
moreover tell us that words such as 'consciousness,' 'knowledge,' &c.,
are relative; neither ordinary nor Vedic language uses expressions such
as 'he knows' without reference to an object known and an agent who
knows.

With reference to the assertion that consciousness constitutes the Self,