„The Dalai Lama as a Pole Cradled in the Arms of Great Wanda Dynowska”- W. Staniewski

„The Dalai Lama as a Pole Cradled in the Arms of Great Wanda Dynowska” – with a vivid film from India: how I found Wanda Dynowska’s burial place, Staniewski 

October 19th (Sunday) 5:30 PM  / Stage in Palace

Known as Umadevi – the Goddess Uma, the Luminous Soul. She was born on June 30, 1888 in St. Petersburg and passed away on March 20, 1971 in Mysore, India. A Polish writer, translator, social activist, and popularizer of Hindu theology and philosophy in Poland. An ambassador of both Indian and Polish culture, a karma yogini, founder and organizer of the Polish-Indian Library. She collaborated with Józef Piłsudski and Mahatma Gandhi, and became the foster mother of the Dalai Lama.

During my travels in India, I pursued yet another goal: to find the final resting place of Wanda Dynowska – the Luminous Soul, as Mahatma Gandhi called her. Today, the greatness of Dynowska – her life story that seems lifted straight out of an epic, her close relationships and cooperation with Piłsudski, Gandhi, Krishnamurti, the blessed Maharishi, and the Dalai Lama – can all be discovered with a single click on the internet. Glory be to the internet for that.

This remarkable and beautiful lady, endowed with an exceptional Dharma, was one of the greatest Polish women of the 20th century. In 1935 she set out for India. Shri Ramana Maharishi became her spiritual guide. In his ashram beneath the Mountain of Flame, Arunachala, her inner transformation unfolded. The rest of her life became one great endeavor to explore and disseminate the sources of spirituality. As she wrote herself, she devoted her being to “a great experiment: the awakening of a new, higher consciousness in humanity.” In 1969, for the second time after the war, she visited Poland, mainly Kraków, where she gave a series of lectures. At that time, I was a student at Jagiellonian University. It was whispered that Kraków had been visited by an extraordinary figure from India.

Soon after, in 1971, she died in Mysore. Just before her passing, she assumed a meditative posture and, clothed as always in a red sari, sitting upright, she gently departed. Her Tibetan disciples carried her body to their settlement, and she seemed to vanish without a trace. It was said she was laid to rest somewhere on the Deccan Plateau in Karnataka, near Mysore – somewhere in Bylakuppe, a settlement she had helped establish, which had since transformed from a primitive refugee camp into an extraterritorial archipelago of thriving monastic colonies. The small bamboo chapel built in the 1960s, once ravaged by wild elephants, now gleams with gold, resounds with the chanting of thousands of monks, and belongs among the largest Buddhist shrines in the world – the Golden Temple.

On January 18, 2012, as the sun set over the ploughed fields, I walked along a narrow path, guided by Mr. Dorjee, who knew the location of Umadevi’s grave. Her stupa stood on a hill surrounded by wide-branched trees, adorned with fluttering Tibetan prayer flags. On the horizon, one could see scattered buildings, and on the surrounding hills picturesque groves. This extraordinary landscape was reminiscent of our Eastern Borderlands. Dynowska’s stupa stood on a clean courtyard enclosed by a white wall – lofty and queenlike. Beside it stood the stupa of her disciple, the Dalai Lama. Beautifully maintained, with incense burning at its base and small votive figures molded by Tibetan children. Here, among the Tibetans, Wanda Dynowska is remembered as Tenzni Chodon – the Torch of Dharma, the Keeper of the Teachings.

Włodzimierz Staniewski

fot. Marcin Butryn