A Sublime Summation of a Lifetime's Work: Mariya Karagyozova and Mark Dyczkowski on Dyczkowski's Completion of his Forty Five Year Long Translation of Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Mariya Karagyozova and Mark Dyczkowski on Dyczkowski's Completion of his Forty Five Year Long Translation
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
A description of Mark Dyczkowski's epochal translation of the great Hindu religious text, Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka, Light on the Tantras, in the context of the author's work in relation to the history of his school and religious texts in general. Illustrated with annotated pictures.
Abhinavagupta and the Trika school are supreme masters in the imaginatively powerful, poetic dramatization of spiritual ideas with a luminous force appreciable even without previous knowledge of their school of thought or even identification with their ideas.
Abhinavagupta' s writing also powerfully demonstrates actualization, in a person's life, of far reaching ideas of intricate beauty, correlating conceptions of consciousness and conceptions of deity, unifying centuries of diverse forms of exploration in Indian thought, the ideational and the imagistic, the philosophical, mythic and spiritual, within theory and practice.
''Power and the holder of power, the flame and the heat of the flame, the mirror and its reflection, the union of the deities Shiva and Shakti, embodied in my father and mother, whose passion gave birth to me, my heart in rhythm with the cosmic heart, may it pulsate'' a combination of images and expressions from his Tantraloka, possibly summing up the central ideas of Trika.
This is represented in the starkest terms by the Bible, the Koran and perhaps the Talmud, texts uniquely canonized within what may be described as highly centralized cultures of textual canonization, in which the founding texts are decreed to be incomparable and without successors. They stand alone and nothing else comes near them in authority.
Below those originating texts come others, inspired directly or indirectly by the founding texts, and demonstrating lofty ideas projected through great expressive power, texts at times reaching a level of influence complementing the founding texts.
Examples of this are Moses de Leon's Zohar, possibly the most impactful work of esoteric Judaism. Another, at a lower level of influence, inspired by approaches to the tradition of which the Zohar may be seen as climatic, are the stories of Nahman of Bratslav.
In Islam, the work of Ibn Arabi, climaxing in The Meccan Illuminations and Jalal ud din Rumi's Mathnawi enjoy such a status.
The picture in Hinduism and Buddhism is more complex. Textual canonization and influence in Hinduism and Buddhism could be understood as both centralized and distributed. They are centralized in the sense that the oldest or one of the oldest founding texts in Hinduism is the Rig-Veda, followed by the Upanishads, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, with the section of the latter known as the Bhagavad Gita enjoying a unique status among the rest of that massive work.
Hinduism, however, is also represented by a proliferation of foundational texts of various schools, various philosophical and practical approaches, related to various thinkers and/or deities. The ideas particularly lucidly expressed in the Upanishads may be seen as unifying all schools of Hinduism and perhaps most schools of Indian philosophy.
The 11th century Kashmiri sage Abhinavagupta is a master of the Trika school, also known as Kashmir Shaivism, dedicated to the deity Shiva, originating in Kashmir and initiated by Vasugupta in his Shiva Sutras, a deeply cryptic but ideationally and expressively daring text.
At the apex of the tradition initiated by Vasugupta is understood to be the work of Abhinavagupta, and at the heart of Abhinavagupta's majestic textual achievement is the Tantraloka.
Picture by Mike Magee
I first encountered Mark
Dyczkowski in his ideationally profound and poetically beautiful
translation of the Shiva Sutras, published by SUNY Press, one of the best
publishers in terms of breadth in various philosophies and spiritualities
outside the central orientations of the West, and even when within the
West, as in their series on Western esotericism and on Tantra.
Dyczkowski is English, but in the pictures here he is dressed in what I understand is an Indian style of dressing, suggesting his immersion in Indian spiritual culture which he engages as both academically trained scholar in the Western tradition and devotee of Indian spiritualities, having got a PhD in Hinduism at Oxford, complementing intense study with Indian scholar practitioners of Indian spiritualities in India, a path similar to that trodden by a number of Western scholars, even within the context of Western academic training and activity as faculty in Western universities.
Dyczkowski's radical simplicity is childlike in its beauty, like a monk who has left the world behind though he lives in it.
The Translation of the Tantrāloka
We are thrilled to announce that after 45 years of the spiritual, intellectual, and human labor of Mark Dyczkowski, his translation of the Tantrāloka has been completed. There are eleven volumes containing the thirty-seven chapters of the Tantrāloka. An introduction is being prepared, and another volume is dedicated to the cross-referencing and exposition of Abhinavagupta's sources. The eleven volumes contain a full, minutely accurate translation of both Abhinavagupta's great work and the commentary by Jayaratha that must be read together with it.
Mark Dyczkowski has worked directly with manuscripts and so has had occasion to make improvements to the published edition in Sanskrit. He has collected all the known unpublished sources Abhinavagupta quotes that have been recovered in the past decades. The translation is furnished with extensive and very detailed notes drawn from the works of the great Kashmiri masters themselves. He also draws from Swami Laksmanjoo's teachings. The understanding of Swamiji's revelation of the Tantrāloka, which is now also in the course of publication, is much enhanced by reading it along with this translation and, so too, vice versa.
There have been several translations in English, Italian, French, and Hindi of all or part of the Tantrāloka. Mark has consulted all of them even though none of them are as accurate, extensively annotated, and supported by decades of research of the unpublished source materials and those already published. Great care has been taken to maintain the most rigorous standards of modern scholarship.
As such, the format precluded detailed discussion of practice. This shortcoming has been compensated by the hundreds of hours of lectures that can be downloaded from https://www.anuttaratrikakula.org/. The written text - one could say our basic Anuttara Trika scripture - is in this way sustained by the teachings of its direct practical application. Put simply, the lectures explain what the text, in its own elevated manner, set in accord with the norms of an Indian technical treatise - *śāstra, *implicitly teaches concerning the practices of Trika Śaivism.
The volumes will be published one or two at a time over the next few months. The volumes are in royal octavo and over 500 pages long. The first two are already available on Amazon.com. They cover chapters one to three. Chapter one is an introduction to the whole Tantrāloka and is concerned with an exposition of the fundamental basis of all practice, namely, transformative insight with devout reverence of our true Śiva nature. It presents the basic categories of practice and so an overview of all the Tantrāloka as the essence of Trika scripture which encompasses all the schools of early Tantric Śaivism.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BW2GDPPP...
Volume two begins with a brief chapter on the realization of our true liberated nature in a flash of enlightenment, Chapter three is a beautiful and profound exposition of the fifty forms of reflective awareness of that reality symbolized by the succession of the letters of the alphabet that constitute the supreme subjectivity of Deity as AHA.M - the great 'I am.'
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BW2HRFTZ...
Volume three is chapter four of the Tantrāloka. Its cardinal feature is an exposition of the Twelve Kālīs. The earliest sources of these teachings, called, amongst other things, Mahānaya or Mahārtha, recovered from unpublished manuscripts are presented in extensive appendices. These have never been published before. The texts are as profound as they are thrilling and beautiful.
Volume four contains chapters five and six. Chapter five is a brilliant and astonishingly beautiful exposition of the types of practices listed in our primary scripture, the *Mālinīvijayottara *as those of the Corporeal Means (āṇavopāya). The following chapter is of great interest to the millions who practice attention to the flow of the cycle of breath. This is called the Wheel of Time (kālacakra). Here, drawing mostly from the Svacchandatantra, Abhinavagupta expounds on how all the cycles of time are experienced within it. Freedom Cole, a well-known and most learned astrologer, has graced this volume with a beautiful, learned, and detailed presentation of the astrology related to this practice. I most gratefully acknowledge him not only for what he has written but also for the many drawings and diagrams that adorn and clarify his exposition.
“This work comes as the fruit of a lifetime of hard work, study, and practice. Now, I am in the phase of life in which we prepare for the final departure. My prayer to Lord Śiva, the Mother, and my master Swami Laksmanjoo is that it will be of benefit to others as it has benefitted me.”
Mark Dyczkowski
Learning about my devotion to his work, demonstrated by the Facebook page I opened on it after contacting him, and in which I wrote some commentaries on his scholarship,Dyczkowski was surprised both by my nationality and my presence in Cambridge, where Black people were present but not in large numbers, as at when I left there in 2016. He also seems to have understood his area of Hindu studies to be far from the interests expected of a Nigerian. Actually, I encountered one of the most famous and poetically and imaginatively remarkable texts of Trika, the Vijnana-Bhairava Tantra, in a book I got possibly from the bookshop of the University of Benin, Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
My first, decisive encounters within Indian philosophy and spirituality, ultimately leading me to Dyczkowski's work, were in my family's library in Lagos, where I read about the Buddha in Charles Connell's World Famous Rebels and the then Bendel Book Depot in Benin-City, where I bought Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, books that enflamed me into becoming a mystic, a seeker of perception of, or immersion in ultimate reality, in emulation of the Buddha and the vision of Brunton's book.