Guest post submitted by Debajyoti Gangopadhyay
Classical Indian Buddhism scholar Suniti Kumar Pathak passed away recently in his Santiniketan house, Bengal. For the whole Indian Buddhist fraternity as well as Indo-Tibetan academia this loss is irreparable. He was 101 years old, which was really a number for him as he was mentally alert till his last day and continued writing through dictation! His life was truly an instance of worship of Prajnaparamita.
Apart from our personal loss, Nalanda Dialogue mission lost its mentor – the transdisciplinary mission which started nearly two decades back under his active patronage centering Navanalanda Mahavihara, Nalanda.
Though he was an ardent follower of the Buddha’s teachings, he can’t be described as a Buddhist in any parochial sense of the word. As a polyglot he extended his interest to almost all traditional Indian Vidyas written in classical languages like Pali, Prakrit, and Sanskrit as well as those translated in Tibetan and Chinese. He wrote extensively on Buddhist Tantra and Dharmashastra. He has completed the unfinished work of Pundit Rahul Sankrityayan, Tibetan-Hindi Lexicon, published in two volumes.
He took the parental initiative to start Nalanda Dialogue Mission nearly 20 years back with a few of us which later flourished literally as the only platform in this country for promoting Science Philosophy Dialogue in its modern form.
In fact, the questions we all in this subcontinent were subjected to address long back during the beginning of the colonial period here was about the question of working out the modes of our proper responsive engagement to the Western knowledge system we started receiving that time! It was the biggest issue which is well known to have shaped further our subsequent academic as well as social fate. But Indian academia is still very much in the process of response to this question which still awaits a proper integrative settlement of the best of East and West!
Acharya Pathak was truly and prophetically a seeker of answer to this colonial question from his own Buddhist perspective, and in that way he inspired a generation to seek the same. His primal initiative in establishing a new Buddhism-Science dialogue in Nalanda was a consequence of this attempt.
A true tribute to him would be to shape our future academia relentlessly on the basis of transdisciplinary dialogue with a spirit nurtured once in Nalanda.
Signatories:
1.Debajyoti Gangopadhyay, Vinoba Bhave University 2. Mihir Kumar Chakraborty ,Calcutta University 3. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, NavaNalanda Mahavihara , Nalanda 4. Rana Purushottam, NavaNalanda Mahavihara , Nalanda 5. Umashankar Vyas , NavaNalanda Mahavihara, Nalanda 6. Tushar Kanti Sarker, Jadavpur University , Kolkata , 7. Dilip Kumar Mahanta , Calcutta University 8. N.D.Haridass , MathScience , Chennai 9. Sisir Roy, National Institute for Advanced Studies , Bengaluru 10 . R. Srikanth , Poorna Prajna Institute for Scientific Research , Bengaluru 11. Vikchu Prajnapal , Nava Nalanda Mahavihara , Nalanda 12. C.S.Unnikrishnan , Defence Research and Development Organization , Pune
This is such a sad loss for the world of Indology and Buddhist Studies.
In early 2020, during a research trip to Santiniketan, my wife and I had the good fortune to meet with Prof. Suniti Kumar Pathak at his home in Avanpalli. He also very kindly did me the great honour of attending the guest lecture I gave on that occasion at the Bhasha-Bhavana of Visva-Bharati University.
During our conversations, he was both affable and deeply learned, and was very generous with his time, sharing many lively and humorous anecdotes of his time working with his erstwhile colleague Prof. C.R. Lama, my own guru, at the Department of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Visva-Bharati. He wore lightly his immense learning and his status of a living legend and, as noted by the authors of this obituary, showed a particular affinity with the thought of the Prajñāpāramitā. I remember him pointing out how remarkable it was that the most profound teaching of the Buddha, who had bequeathed such a vast and varied array of scriptures to posterity, was that of his ineffable silence.
With deepest sympathy to his family and loved ones.
Not a little suffering in my life has been occasioned by discourses variously claiming dogmatic authority for science or scripture: to the point that I found an ironic providence in the perception that we suffer above all in stiffness, rigidity, inflexibility, and failure to adapt
That perception now endures through all we learn about inflammation, exercise, mindfulness and language, while all the most prominent dogmatic claims of the century past have been variously fractured and discredited. Silence then indeed speaks for wisdom, and contentment with simple, helpful tasks like a dictionary.
Back when the crisis of classical science broke around the turnif the twentieth century, the best of philosophy in the West took the modest form of reviews, often in the French journal Revue de la Metaphysique et Morale, now followed in a still more accessible style by Notre Dame university. And in recent science, the posting of drafts, working papers and articles under serial revision as preprints has at times outpaced conventional publishing, allowing creative thought to be just provisional and ephemeral, and the more creative for all that.
Indian philosophy, could certainly use a forum or repository like that. Philpapers had been mentioned, and works well as an archive, but the more open exemplar is, ironically again, the Philsci Archive.