Seeking the Ultimate in Ultimate Simplicity: Celebrating Mark Dyczkowski, Awesome Scholar/Practitioner of the Trika School of Hinduism
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Mark Dyczkowski
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
A celebration of Mark Dyczkowski, the great scholar and practitioner of the Trika school of Hinduism, enriched by pictures taken at his talk in Cambridge, UK, in October 2016, where I met him. The images are by Mike Magee, who created and runs Shiva Shakti Mandalam, the fantastic site on Tantra, the broad spiritual orientation to which Trika belongs within Hinduism.
Mark Dyczkowski has gone.
2 February 2025.
He completed his translation of and commentary on the Tantraloka, one of the world's greatest writings, and not many years after, left the world.
Mark Dyczkowski playing an Indian musical instrument after the Cambridge talk
I ask myself, what am I doing with my life?
Little things or the life defining things?
I met Markji, as he was respectfully called, while I was living in Cambridge, UK.
I had opened a Facebook group on him and was attending an October 2016 meeting in Cambridge which was convened for him to discuss the work of the great Hindu mystic and theologian Abhinavagupta, author of the Tantraloka.
He told me he was struck that the person who had initiated that Facebook group on his work was a Black person and a Black person living in Cambridge, two not very likely conjunctions at the time, though I don't know of now.
I had been introduced to Indian thought by my family's library, particularly the chapter on the Buddha in Charles Connells' World Famous Rebels, by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's essay on Indian philosophy in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971 ed. and by Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India, the latter from the Bendel Book Depot, then one of the richer bookshops in Benin-City, all these being texts bringing alive Indian spiritualities and philosophies as experiential enquiries into the deepest questions, resulting in the consuming of the self by its encounter with the mystery that enables existence.
The University of Benin 's bookshop brought the amazing Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, an utterly inimitable text, one of the classics of Trika, Abhinavagupta 's school, into my hands through Paul Reps' exquisite Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
I later went on to read the Bhagavad Gita and selections from the Upanishads, masterpieces representing the loftiest heights reached by human thought.
In England, I discovered Dyczkowski's work through his magnificent translation of and awesome commentary to Vasugupta's Shiva Sutras,The Aphorisms of Shiva, which I found in the catalogue of the publisher SUNY Press, which has a wonderful stable of books on Trika.
Mark Dyczkowski and I
My encounter with this galaxy of texts established in my being the awareness that there have existed and there exist people whose existence is anchored in Something beyond the visible, a compelling power calling the human being to itself as the summation of all possibilities, a tantalizing force like the pipe calling the rats to plunge to their doom in the river in the European fairy tale "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", but in this instance, a melody conjuring alluring vistas to the bewitched human mind, which now struggles to unite the world of the body and society and the cosmos beyond it, hence the escape from belonging to the world represented par excellence by some of the greatest Indian mystics, and the balance between the life of a person withdrawn from absorption in the world and participation in that world, a confluence embodied by Mark Dyczkowski.
Markji was the consummate scholar priest in the quintessential Indian tradition, ascetic and lofty of mind, simple yet immersed in ultimate profundities, a magnificent translator of recondite yet soaring texts and a spell binding commentator on those jewel wisdoms.
Mark Dyczkowski with Mike Magee
His works line his path to the Ultimate.
The Stanzas on Vibration, Canon of the Saivagama, The Aphorisms of Shiva, the Spandapradipika, Journey in the World of Tantras, The Cult of the Goddess Kubjika, and ultimately, the multi-volume Tantraloka..
Master, you have gone to join the adepts who travelled before you- the magnificent Jaideva Singh, of the luminous translations and sparkling commentary, the capacious K.C. Pandey, the lion who gave us the most compendious work on Abhinavagupta, the inimitable Swami Lakshman Joo, who revived Trika in the modern world and down to the light at the top of the trail, the master of immense genius, lord of devotion and of theological and mystical expression, Abhinavagupta himself, while resounding powerfully are the footsteps of the adepts who are here with us on the other side, the magical Bettina Baumer, the colossal Alexis Sanderson, Kerry Martin Skora, Jeffrey Lidke and many more whose names I do not know.
Mark Dyczkowski on stage preparing for the Cambridge talk
What is the lesson of this master's life?
Devote your life to something greater than you.
As a youth, though an Englishman, he lived in India, studying complex Sanskrit texts with Indian spiritual masters and scholars, and later consummated his studies in Sanskrit sacred works with Alexis Sanderson who guided his PhD at Oxford, as well as working with such masters in India as Lakshman Joo, after which he gained a second PhD at the Banaras Hindu University and a D.Litt at the Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishwavidyalaya, both in India.
Markji was henceforth known as the monk like sage scholar living in Varanasi, India, bringing out book after book, in his uncompromisingly unique quality as he mapped Trika through astonishing explorations in textual depths only the most rigorously grounded may adequately illuminate.
We all held our breaths, hoping he would one day translate the Tantraloka, blessing the English reading world with that masterpiece of religious thought, a counterpart to those Everests of spiritual power as Ibn Arabi 's Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Illuminations, a summit of Islamic thought, which Eric Winkel is still translating, I expect, with his intricately eloquent commentaries, the Zohar, the seminal Judaic mystical text, translated by Daniel Matt, the Mahabharata, the one book library that is one of the foundations of Hinduism, variously translated by van Buitenen and others, works representing some of the topmost peaks of the world's spiritual literature, its authors recognizable, their life histories known, except perhaps for the Mahabharata, as different from the obscure mists in which dwell the creators of the earliest, foundational spiritual texts, the Hindu Upanishads, the Yoruba ese ifa, among others, those other works closer to us in time yet requiring the most thorough and profound scholarship and imaginative sensitivity to properly render in another language, along with commenting adequately on them.
Mark Dyczkowski expounding on a point during the talk
So, here we are, on the other side of the great ocean, hopefully fulfilling the tasks we have found for ourselves.
