Siva's Own Scholar: Mark Dyczkowski

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:

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:

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:

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.