The Contemporary Scholar-Practitioner

In 2009 a man published fourteen volumes on a tantra that had barely been read in the modern period. He had spent, on his own account, twenty years editing and translating the Kubjika scriptures and the schools around them.

Fourteen volumes

Mark Dyczkowski was born in London in 1951 and set out overland for India in 1969, at seventeen. He enrolled at Banaras Hindu University the following year, took a BA and an MA there, and then went to Oxford for a doctorate, where, in his own words, Alexis Sanderson was his teacher. At the end of 1979 he went back to India, and India is where he stayed.

The work is the thing to look at. Fourteen volumes of text and translation on the Manthanabhairavatantra, a scripture of the Kubjika tradition, published in 2009. A translation and study of Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka with Jayaratha’s commentary, eleven volumes of it. Critical editions of texts that had survived chiefly in Nepalese manuscripts and had barely been read in the modern period. Goudriaan and Schoterman had edited the Kubjikamatatantra in 1988, and Schoterman the Satsahasrasamhita before that; much of what can now be said about that transmission rests on Dyczkowski’s volumes. He was academic adviser to the Muktabodha Digital Library Project, whose library is the reason a great deal of this material can now be searched at all.

He was also, and said so plainly, an initiate. In 1976 he went to Kashmir, in the last years of the recovery this volume’s third chapter describes, and on his own website he wrote that he was there “to study at the feet of Swami Laksmanjoo, the last living Master of the Kashmiri tradition itself. There I was blessed with great good fortune of receiving initiation from him and attending his classes on the Tantraloka for six months and listening to recordings of his lessons of the previous five years.” He wrote afterwards of “the sadhana into which I had been initiated by Swami Laksmanjoo,” and he dedicated the Tantraloka translation with “my prayer to Lord Siva, the Mother and my master Swami Laksmanjoo is that it will be of benefit to others as it has benefitted me.”

He was given the title Rajanaka in March 2024. He died in Varanasi on 2 February 2025, on Vasant Panchami, at seventy-three.

The historian

Alexis Sanderson travelled to Kashmir in February 1972, aged twenty-three, with a Sanskrit degree from Oxford, and was accepted as a pupil by the same teacher. He has written that Lakshman Joo “taught me for six years and for no reason other than the urge to propagate understanding that is the mark of the true teacher in any discipline,” and that “the purpose of my pupilage was to attempt to understand his understanding of the texts of Abhinavagupta and those texts themselves.”

Pupil and pupilage are the words he uses.

What he went on to publish is the reconstruction that the rest of this treatise leans on. The Saiva Age, The Saiva Literature, the long essays on the Saiva exegesis of Kashmir and on the relation between the Saiva and Buddhist tantric corpora: taken together they trace how the tantric canon came together, who borrowed from whom, and in what order. He held the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford from 1992 until 2015 and is emeritus. The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies states that he has been preparing a critical edition of the Tantraloka, with a translation and commentary.

His method is worth naming, because it is the opposite of the one a devotee would use. He dates texts by who quotes whom, tracks the migration of whole ritual sequences from one canon into another, and treats a tradition’s account of its own antiquity as evidence about the tradition rather than about antiquity. In an April 2018 handout for a lecture at the University of Chicago he set out how he uses an insider’s account: as a starting point, under a heading of that name, and then against five stated limitations, among them the tendency of a living tradition to deny that it has changed or lost anything.

Varanasi

Bettina Sharada Baumer was born in Salzburg in April 1940, took a doctorate at Munich in 1967, and moved to India the same year. She has lived and worked mainly there since, apart from a lectureship at Vienna from 1975 to 1979 and later visiting posts in Europe, and she took Indian citizenship in 2011. She is Austrian by birth.

Her working life has been Varanasi. She was research director of the Alice Boner Foundation from 1979 to 2000, edited the Kalatattvakosa, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts’ lexicon of fundamental concepts in Indian art, took a Habilitation at Vienna in 1997, and now directs the Abhinavagupta Research Library there. She co-edited, with Sarla Kumar, the volume in which Sanderson’s essay on their teacher appeared.

She describes the turn in her own work on her own website: study of the texts, and of Abhinavagupta in particular, since 1976, “intensified and deepened since initiation into the tradition by Swami Lakshman Joo in 1987.” The date is worth pausing on, because it is contested in a small way. Her site says 1987. Shail Mayaram, reviewing her memoir in The Wire in December 2025, writes that “after experiencing self-realisation Baumer received diksha from Swami Lakshman Joo in 1986.” The two differ by a year and this chapter cannot settle which is right.

Her memoir, The Light In-Between: A Journey of Recognition, was published in New Delhi in 2025. This chapter has not read it.

Rochester

Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega took his doctorate in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under Gerald Larson, whom he credits in his first book with having “first introduced me to the study of Abhinavagupta and who patiently guided me during the writing of this book.” That book, The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir, was published by the State University of New York Press in 1989, and it is still in print and still cited as a study of Abhinavagupta’s Kaula theology. He taught at Michigan State and then at the University of Rochester, where he was a full professor and from which, in his own words, he retired in 2009.

He is also a co-author, with Douglas Renfrew Brooks and others, of Meditation Revolution: A History and Theology of the Siddha Yoga Lineage (1997), published by the lineage’s own press. This chapter has not read it. He founded a school of his own, Blue Throat Yoga, in 2006, three years before he left the university, and has taught meditation through it since, under a name he says he coined himself: “Nilakanta meditation is a modern term that I gave to the style of meditation practice that I’m teaching”, a name he glosses from the blue throat of Shiva.

The translator

Christopher Wallis, who teaches as Hareesh, took an M.Phil. at Oxford in 2005 and a doctorate in Sanskrit at Berkeley in 2014. His The Recognition Sutras, a translation and study of Ksemaraja’s twenty-sutra summary of the Pratyabhijna doctrine, ran to 544 pages when Mattamayura Press published it in October 2017, and it is written for readers coming to Kashmiri Saiva thought without Sanskrit. An earlier book, Tantra Illuminated, gave its name to the teaching organisation he has run since 2019.

His own site lists his teachers in order. The first three matter here. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda comes first, as his root-guru. Then Paul Muller-Ortega, for Saiva Tantra and classical yoga. Then Alexis Sanderson, for Saiva and Sakta Tantra and Sanskrit.

Four of the six are bound to each other as teacher and student, since Sanderson also taught Dyczkowski at Oxford, and the binding runs across the two kinds of transmission this volume keeps separating.

His own site also states that he was initiated by a traditional Indian guru at the age of sixteen.

He has also set out a view of the Kashmiri Saiva lineage, in an interview conducted in 2011. Asked whether the lineage stopped with Lakshman Joo’s death, he said he agreed with that, and then narrowed what he meant: Saivism, he said, is gone in Kashmir now. Later in the same interview, arguing that the Trika was never confined to Kashmir and that the label Kashmir Shaivism should be dropped, he put it this way. “But as far as we know Swami Lakshman Joo was the last guru of the Trika per se. He didn’t give the abhisheka, he didn’t create a successor, but he did give a transmission to Mark Dyczkowski, Bettina Baumer, Rameshwar Jha and others.”

The chair

Sthaneshwar Timalsina took a master’s degree at Sampurnananda Sanskrit University in Varanasi, founded the department of Tantric studies at Nepal Sanskrit University in Kathmandu, and completed a doctorate at Martin Luther University in Halle in 2005. He taught at San Diego State from that year, and since 2023 has held the Nirmal K. and Augustina Mattoo Endowed Chair in Classical Indic Humanities at Stony Brook University, where he is the chair’s second holder. His books include Seeing and Appearance, Consciousness in Indian Philosophy, Tantric Visual Culture and Language of Images, and he writes in Sanskrit as well as English.

In 2019 he founded the Vimarsha Foundation, a registered non-profit based in California. It offers its new courses free of charge and charges a tuition fee for the archive afterwards, against which students who cannot pay may request a scholarship. Between April and August 2025 it deposited three hundred and forty-nine items of his recorded teaching in an open repository as a citable archive. Nothing has been added since.

The Foundation also publishes an account of his training. It names his father as his first Tantric guru, and two diksha gurus, Prem Chetan of Baglung and Samkara Caitanya Bharati of Kashmir, under the second of whom it dates his consecration as acarya to 1996.

The word itself

Scholar-practitioner is the term usually reached for to describe this group, and it is worth knowing where it comes from before leaning on it. This chapter has not traced its origin. It is used in education studies and in Buddhist studies, and in the scholarship on Hindu Tantra this chapter found it almost nowhere. The one prominent appearance located is in David Gordon White’s introduction to Tantra in Practice, published by Princeton in 2000, and there it is a criticism.

White is cataloguing three reactions to the colonial caricature of Tantra, all of which he faults for inheriting its essentialism. The first is denial that any such thing ever existed. The second is “Tantric scholar-practitioners, both Asian and Western, who, in an attempt to rehabilitate this image of Tantra, have emphasized the refined (“right-handed”) philosophical speculation” that grew, on his account, out of the practices they were playing down. The third is the for-profit purveyors of Tantric sex.

The term is also, now, a self-description. Wallis’s own site opens by calling him “a Sanskritist and scholar-practitioner of Classical Tantra with thirty years of experience.”

And White’s objection is narrower than it is usually made to sound. Elsewhere in the same introduction he writes that “the Tantric insider’s or emic view must of necessity also be incorporated into our description.” What he is against is sanitising a tradition in order to defend it. Anyone who has looked at the Agama and Veda question, or at how the tantric canon classifies itself, will recognise that a practitioner’s knowledge of a living rite answers questions a manuscript cannot.

What they built

These six are not a complete set, and this chapter does not offer them as one. They are the figures whose published work the preceding volumes of this treatise have leaned on most heavily. Others belong in any wider account, Douglas Renfrew Brooks among them, whose The Secret of the Three Cities (Chicago, 1990) and Auspicious Wisdom (SUNY, 1992) are two book-length English studies of Sri Vidya, and who teaches at Rochester, where Muller-Ortega also taught.

What the six have in common is a body of work. Between them they have put into print, in English and in critical editions, a literature that a century ago was largely unedited and, outside a few Sanskrit series, unread. That is not a new ambition. John Woodroffe was publishing tantric texts in English from 1913, when the first volume of his Tantrik Texts series appeared in Calcutta, and the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies was putting the Saiva works of the valley into print in Sanskrit. It sits alongside the other modern openings this volume has followed, the recovery in Kashmir and the open-access experiment at Devipuram. What has changed is the scale, the standard of editing, and the fact that most of it was done from inside universities where this material had no place in the curriculum when Woodroffe was alive.

Their religious lives are their own. Dyczkowski wrote about his, at length and by name. Baumer and Wallis each state theirs in a sentence on their own websites. Timalsina’s foundation states his for him. Sanderson has described his six years with Lakshman Joo as pupilage. This chapter reports what each has put on the record and goes no further.

The next and closing chapter of this Volume asks what the seven preceding ones compose together.

The editions are on the shelf. They will outlast every argument about who was entitled to make them.