Arnold Kunst

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).