Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 4, Brahmana 3. The self-luminous Self: waking, dream, and the light of man
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
The Self becomes his light
"When the sun has set, Yajnavalkya, the moon has set, the fire has gone out, and speech has fallen silent, what then is the light of this person?" "The Self becomes his light. For it is by the light of the Self that he sits, goes about, does his work, and returns."
At last every outer light is removed: no sun, no moon, no fire, and now no sound either. What is left to light a person. Yajnavalkya gives the answer the whole sequence was driving toward: the Self (atman). It is by the Self's own light that a person sits, moves, works, and returns. The Self is the one light that can never be taken away.
In the commentaries
Sankara reads this as the turning point of Yajnavalkya's whole instruction to Janaka. The king is led down a ladder of borrowed lights: the sun fails, the moon fails, the fire dies, the voice falls silent, and at each step a lesser lamp is handed to the questioner. When every external light is withdrawn, the answer that remains is the Self, by whose light alone a man sits, walks, works, and returns. For Sankara the point is not that the Self is one more lamp in the series, but that it is the light that was lending itself to all the others all along.