It has been one year since Markji passed away. Mark S. G. Dyckowski.
I remember very well the first time I saw him, at a conference in Benares, given by the great Arindam Chakravarti. In Sanskrit. About memory. In 2003.
At the end, Mark walked straight towards me and handed me two booklets - translations from the Yoginī tradition. I had never seen him before. He didn’t know me. Yet he directly offered me those texts and invited me to come to his house in Narad Ghat. I went there for two years, three times a week.
I knew him before, though - through his translations and books. I had read his Stanzas on Vibration well over a dozen times, in my room as a teenager in my parents’ house, seated on the ground, with the book placed on a music shelf belonging to my father, a violinist.
Mark was, basically, a true English gentleman.
In February 2020, two weeks before the start of the pandemic, we met again. He looked at me before his usual teaching sessions. I was there alone in his library, with my girlfriend and three other people. He looked at me with that same look he had when he played the sitar - like a child.
And he said: “Today, I’ll speak about Parātriṃśikā-vivaraṇam!”
And he spoke… my goodness. An unforgettable teaching, out of the blue, on that most difficult of texts of “Kashmir Shaivism”.
He was a true lover of Truth.
In August 2022, he gave me a copy of the Chummā-saṅketa-prakāśa, a lost teaching recording the oral transmissions of the Yoginīs—the true fountainhead of Kashmir Shaivism, we concluded. I translated the text into French and English before Christmas. Mark agreed to come to Paris to teach on this rediscovered jewel for the first time. He revised my translation and gave wonderful teachings, full of spirit and humour.
He was already very weak.
But in 2024 he offered me the task of completing and revising his translation of the Satsāhasra-saṃhitā, an important tantra of the Kubjikā tradition. He even offered to arrange payment for one year.
But then he became too weak. And he passed away in February 2025. One year ago.
Sadly, some people then accused me of having “stolen” Markji’s translation of the Chummā. And since then I have received no news of what became of the rest of that precious text Markji had entrusted to me to revise and complete. It is all the more ironic that Mark himself had suffered so much, throughout his life, from having been accused of stealing texts and translations from other scholars.
I hope that all these misunderstandings will one day be cleared up, for the benefit of all lovers of wisdom.
Thank you, Mark.
David
