Kunst, A.
| English Phonetics | Arnold Kunst |
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| Sort Name | Kunst, Arnold |
| Birth: | 1903 |
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| Death: | 1981 |
| Place of birth: | Poland |
Tibetan calendar dates
| Website: | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00221062 |
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Biographical Information
Born in Poland, Arnold Kunst studied first at the University of Lwów. He later studied in Vienna, with Erich Frauwallner, as well as in Warsaw, with Stanislaw Schayer; and it was under this gifted Warsaw historian of Indian philosophy and religion that he took his doctorate. His thesis, published under the title of Probleme der buddhistischen Logik in der Darstellung des Tattvasaṅgraha (Polska Akademia Umiejȩtności, Prace komisji orientalistycznej Nr. 33, Kraków 1939), was devoted to an edition and translation of the Anumāna-chapter in Śāntarakṣita's great treatise on the main topics of Indian philosophy. Together with his teacher Stanistaw Schayer, Arnold Kunst was thus responsible for inaugurating in Europe the careful study on both a philological and philosophical basis of Śāntarakṣita's Tattvasaṃgraha.
Having moved to England just before the war, Arnold Kunst published in collaboration with E. H. Johnston the Sanskrit text of Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī (Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 9 [1948-1951], pp. 99-152; reprinted, with an English translation in Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, The dialectical method of Nāgārjuna, Delhi 1978). His continuing interest in problems of Indian logic is reflected in later articles, such as the one on the vexed question of the excluded middle in Buddhism (Rocznik Orientalistyczny 21 [1957], pp. 141-7). His work on the Tattvasaṃgraha and Kamalaśīla's Pañjikā on it also brought him to lndo-Tibetan studies. In this field he published not only an edition of the Tibetan translation, contained in the Tibetan bsTan 'gyur, of Kamalaśīla's Pañjikā on the Anumāna-chapter of the Tattvasaṃgraha but also a detailed study on the editions of the bsTan 'gyur, one of our main sources for the history of classical Indian philosophy (Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 8 [1947], pp. 106-216).
In 1947 Arnold Kunst took leave of absence from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), where he had been appointed a lecturer, to take up a post as an international civil servant at the United Nations secretariat in New York. There he remained until 1963, dealing with non-selfgoverning territories in the Trusteeship Department. This new activity brought him again, if in a different way, into close contact with Asia, where he travelled extensively; and in carrying out this work he was no doubt inspired and helped by his training as an Indologist and historian of Indian and Buddhist thought.
On resuming a lectureship at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1964, Arnold Kunst turned his attention to early and classical Indian thought in general. From this period comes for example his study on the interpretation of the Svetāśvataropaniṣad (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 31 [1968], pp. 309-314) which has recently been reprinted in India in a volume of essays dedicated to Ludwik Sternbach, his old friend and colleague both in Indological studies and at the United Nations (Ludwik Sternbach felicitation volume, Akhila Bharatiya Sanskrit Parishad, Lucknow 1979, pp. 565-572).
Arnold Kunst gave expression to his humanistic and pragmatic concerns in Indian studies in his article 'Man - the creator' published in this journal (JIP 4 [1976], pp. 51-68). Pointing out there that classical Indian thought was largely non-theistic (rather than atheistic), and that in it man rather than God very often figures as creator, he has observed that 'the soteriological spark lies in man, the obstacles and hindrances in creation, and the kinetisation of the spark generated by the realization of the dichotomy [between creation and puruṣa, etc.] is enhanced by such variety of methods as each separate system has adopted .... The versatile Yoga system as known from the Yogasūtras has but reversed the processes of the Sāṃkhya ontology and by their adaptation to the exclusively psychological aspects has devised a way to manipulate the intrinsic and extrinsic phenomena.., to de-create creation and to con-struct the absolute by de-struction of the phenomenal' (p. 57). 'To those to whom God is the maker and creator, a man-made creation, acquitting God of his creatures' good and bad experiences and actions, may be heresy and offence .... It was gnosticism that was the rule and orthodoxy rather than exception and heresy in post-Vedic thinking in India, while it was exception and heresy rather than rule and orthodoxy in Christian religions' (p. 62). 'The egoeentrism of man was, no doubt, responsible for the emphasis on his soteriological aspirations, and on the setting of his moral and ethical code. The question was, how far this code included or excluded man's participation in society and how much stress it laid on solipsistic criteria as yardsticks of man's advancement as a member of a nation .... In ancient India, the transitional period from Vedic ritualism to soteriological speculations was generally marked by total or partial rejection of God's interference in man's quest for spiritual attainment .... It sounds all so very pragmatic; but the pragmatism is of a type difficult to translate into social values. Modern India has tried to undo the social damage brought about by •.. overspiritualization. It was tried to reintroduce God as the creator in order to unburden man of his cosmic responsibility and turn his attention to India as a society .... The attempt, though formidable, is by no means uniform .... Non-theism has largely shifted to either agnosticism or to theism' (pp. 62-63).
In his two-fold activity as a scholar - in Warsaw, Vienna, Oxford, London, and Cambridge - and as an international civil servant - in New York and Asia - Arnold Kunst sought to resolve one of the dualities to which he has called attention, that between social values involving participation and the (perhaps 'overspiritualized') world of the mind. (D. Seyfort Ruegg, "IN MEMORIAM ARNOLD KUNST (1903-1981)," Journal of Indian Philosophy 11 (1983) 3-5).
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