Obit

Siva's Own Scholar: Mark Dyczkowski

Aravindan Neelakandan

Feb 04, 2025, 03:48 PM | Updated 03:48 PM IST

Dr. Mark Dyczkowski, scholar and author of Tantra and Kashmiri Trika Shaivism.

Dyczkowski went beyond being an academic who follows merely the fashionable or the dominant format provided by the academia.

Refusing to be a conventional ‘spiritual Westerner’, he understood how this culture evolves and the underlying oneness that manifested itself in diverse forms.

An eighteen-year old Polish boy setting foot in India in 1969 in search of spirituality is not exactly something extraordinary. It was the age of hippies and other assorted ‘spiritual’ seekers. Most of them dissipated into the heat and dust of India while a significant number of them got swindled.

There has also been a trend of superficial seekers use their sojourn in India and their dabbling in spirituality to damn or deconstruct in a distorted way Indian traditions. This is a big business in the academic and media industry of the West.

It is a huge temptation.

But only a very handful of such non-Indians sincerely went through their pursuit and achieve their goal. Even among them only a handful could become both academically endowed with analytical tools and also spiritually realised through traditional spiritual practices. They traversed with ease both the worlds. And they benefitted Dharma.

Mark Dyczkowski PhD, was one such rarest of the rare persons.

He came here. He gave his all to the spiritual path he chose. He also served the path that gave him illumination by immersing himself in hard work to present an authentic rendering of his path in the academia.

The path that chose him was Kashmiri Trika Shaivism.

In 1976, he was initiated by Swami Laksman Joo (1907-1991). He had obtained graduation and post-graduation degrees in Indian philosophy from Banaras Hindu University (BHU). Then he returned to the West. He completed his PhD in Trika Shaivism under the guidance of Indologist Alexis Sanderson, who had also learned Kashmiri Saivism from Swami Lakshman Joo.

An academic, a spiritual practitioner of Trika Saivism, Dyczkowski was also an accomplished sitarist. Thus he imbibed the spiritual culture as a lived experience inside his being.

His presentation of the complex evolution of forms through which Hindu spiritual traditions manifested themselves in itself a testimony to his understanding of the inner dynamics of Hindu universe:

The powerful Muslim presence, with the loss of patronage ... coupled with their active wide scale destruction of temples, brought about the end of extensive religious foundations. Thus Buddhism with its network of large monastic institutions died out, as did the original Saiva and Vaishnava monasteries that were their Hindu counterpart. [...] Monumental temples and monasteries were replaced by no less grand, detailed and extensive sacred geographies which integrated the myriads of local cults, great and small, into robust networks that could elude and resist the Muslim determination to conversion. [...] But now the enemy was no longer within and the destruction wrought was more terrible. So the deities of the Tantras appeared in huge numbers in the public domain and mingled there with the divine forms already there. Each was allotted a place, and the magnitude of their sacrality and power was no longer measured by the size of the modest temples, shrines and domestic altars they inhabited, but by the power of place from which they drew their energy first and to which they returned it, strengthened. In this way the countless millions of gods and goddesses of lndia could work together, co-ordinated by the network of sacred sites that covered every corner, great and small, of the vast land of Bharata.

A journey in the world of Tantras, pp.20-21

This passage in a nut shell brings out the complex evolutionary path Hindu spirituality took under the trauma of invasions, destructions of their temples and pressures for conversion.

It shows how the invasions, a violent challenge to Indian spirituality and civilization, further made the Gods and Goddesses of the inner space become a formidable force of India’s sacred geography making the spiritual unity of India even stronger.

In yet another passage he points out how the Puranas and the sacred geography which are in public domain and the Tantra divinities worshipped through esoteric forms.

The mainstream academia on Indian religion in general and Vedic Hinduism in particular have made certain axioms in their study of Indian spiritual evolution. It is that it should always be framed by a binary of Brahminism and non-Brahminism. Anything good and positive would be non-Brahminical and anything negative would be categorised as Brahminical. Anything that was categorised as negative and Brahminical yester year, when that very trait becomes fashionable in Western academic world, then it would become non-Brahminical in Indological studies. This is very much true of many academic studies of Tantra.

But Dyczkowski provides a harmonious parallel developments in varied streams through which Indian culture evolved:

Parallel to these developments in the Tantras are those in the Puranas. These sacred texts sanctioned public forms of religion, including the Saktism that developed from the middle of the first millennium. [...] The subsequent evolution of the sacred geography of the Sakta pithas thus mirrors the evolution of Saktism in the Puranas as much, indeed more, than in the Tantras. [...] Prior to the 13th century or even later, the goddess Durga, although known to the Tantras, plays insignificant role in the Tantras’ ritual programmes. She is the public non-Tantric representative of the secret Tantric goddesses. [...] Thus Tantric cults and their sacred geography survive both within the adept and his home as well as in the outer world to the degree in which they can be assimilated or adapted to the public domain without losing their essentially secret, internal identity.

ibid., pp.147-148

In both the passages quoted, one can see that Dyczkowski went beyond being an academic who follows merely the fashionable or the dominant format provided by the academia.

He also refused to be a conventional ‘spiritual Westerner’ who has adapted a Hindu esoteric tradition. He understood how this culture evolves; he understood the pathways of that evolution and he also understood the underlying oneness that manifested itself in diverse forms.

In the first passage cited he showed how Indian culture adapted and reorganised itself to offer resistance against proselytization. But he also showed how Indian culture continued to preserve, conserve its seed elements to achieve optimum spiritual realisation for the individual.

In the second passage cited, he had shown how Indian culture in bringing out new forms in its streams never lost track of its fundamental reason for existence. The diverse traditions favoured each other in creating an environment that can only be termed as spiritual democracy as it created an environment in which the most respected sacred knowledge of self-realisation was made available to each and every member of the national life in varied forms suitable for the individuals.

Thus Mark Dyczkowski created a powerful and rooted framework for religious studies which awaits to be utilized by scholars in other spiritual traditions.

In fact his work can throw much light on the evolution and content of Tamizh Saiva Siddhanta. Kashmiri-Tamizh Saivite connections have been well attested in archaeology and doctrinal parallels as well as parallels in practices exist. So his works have potential for such important comparative studies which will further expand and deepen Saiva tradition.

Mark Dyczkowski not only authentically translated the treatises of Trika Shaivism like the famous Śiva Sūtra into English along with their traditional commentaries (as that of Bhāskara's Vārttika in this case), he also gave explanatory notes. These were no small achievements. In his in-depth analytical work on Kashmir Shaivism, ‘The Doctrine of Vibration’, this is how Dyczkowski concludes:

The yogi's body is the universe, the senses the energies that vitalise it, his mind Mantra, the rhythm of his breath the pulse of time and his inner nature pure, dynamic consciousness. Raised above all practice, and hence all possibility of falling to lower levels, the yogi realises that he has always been free and that his journey through the dark land of Maya was nothing but a dream, a construct of his own imagination.

'The Doctrine of Vibrations', p.218

Perhaps this could have been the self-description of Mark Dyczkowski himself in his pilgrimage into the intricate pathways of Kashmir Saivism and Tantras, a pilgrimage in which he gave as much as he received. That he merged with Siva on the day of Saraswati is in itself perhaps significant. May his sacred memory inspire and guide us to do to each of our spiritual traditions, what he did to Trika Saivism.