Karel Werner (12 January 1925 – 26 November 2019[1]) was an indologist, orientalist, religious studies scholar, and philosopher of religion born in Jemnice in what is now the Czech Republic.
Here Werner started his secondary education in the local grammar school (called reálné gymnasium) which was interrupted by the incorporation of Znojmo into the ‘Sudetenland’ after the Munich 'agreement' in 1938.
He continued his studies in Brno, but could not undergo final, so-called ‘maturity’, examinations, because of restrictions imposed by the German occupation authorities in the closing years of the war.
He passed them after the war in the liberated Czechoslovakia in autumn 1945 and enrolled in the Philosophical Faculty of the Masaryk University in Brno, reading philosophy and history and studying Sanskrit and classical Chinese from textbooks.
He was earmarked for the post of assistant in the Philosophy Department headed by Professor J. L. Fischer who, upon being appointed Rector of Palacký University in Olomouc, asked him to follow him.
After his military service, Werner did not get his previous job back, but was transferred, in a similar capacity, to the headquarters of the nationalised enterprise overseeing restaurants and canteens.
Time permitting, Werner continued his studies and published articles on indological topics in England, West Germany, India and Sri Lanka.
Werner’s foreign contacts led to his being investigated by the secret police on suspicion of belonging to a spy ring, passing messages abroad under the pretence of academic articles.
He mastered the basic set of hatha yoga positions and procedures, adopted the practice of Buddhist meditation and headed a clandestine group of like-minded practitioners.
He further entered into correspondence with foreign organisations and personalities, among them with the Buddhist Society in London, the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and its editor Nyanaponika Thera, The Yoga Institute in Santa Cruz, Bombay and Lonavla, the Buddhistisches Seminar für Seinskunde, founded and conducted by Paul Debes from his isolated retreat in Lüneburger Heide near Hamburg, the Yoga Institute in Fulda, West Germany, founded by Dr Otto Albert Isbert, Mrs C. Walinski-Heller in Nürnberg, who had been in 1959 the Mother of Svami Shivanada’s ashram in Rishikesh, and the Order Ārya Maitreya Mandala (AMM) founded in India by Lama Anagarika Govinda and headed in West Germany by Dr. Karl-Heinz Gottmann.
His working place was the Psychiatric Institute in Kroměříž (1967–68), where he was engaged in a project researching the physiological processes during the practice of yoga and meditation and the possibilities of their therapeutic application.
For that purpose he was personally subjected to the appropriate measurements of his bodily functions, which included the EEG of his brain activity, while assuming yogic positions and practising meditation.
He also visited Mrs Walinski-Heller, who outlined a plan to open a clinic for yoga therapy in Nürnberg in collaboration with the Kroměříž Institute, Werner acting as a go-between.
It also prevented Werner’s planned departure for England by air, to fulfill an invitation from the Buddhist Society in London to lecture at their Summer School that month.
He fulfilled his teaching assignment, but anticipating renewed oppression in his native country after the re-introduction of totalitarian government, which would inevitably lead to his further persecution, Werner decided to stay and settle in England.
During his academic tenure Werner travelled extensively in Asian countries, including India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan.
The Society for Science and Art (Svaz pro vědu a umění), with headquarters in the USA and membership recruited from Czech and Slovak refugee academics around the World could hold its biennial conference for the first time in Prague and he was invited to chair its section on religions.
Werner’s research was directed to the collections of Vedic hymns, particularly those which contain philosophical ideas or can be construed as anticipating the beginnings of yoga, and to the question of their possible origin in Indo-European antiquity.
In the academic year 2012/13 SOAS inaugurated a new MA course, in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation, and Werner was invited to give the keynote lecture during its first session.
The discourses appeal to him by their rationality and by methodical descriptions of meditative practices, but he does not regard himself as a ‘believing Buddhist’; he points out that embracing a faith absolutely often leads astray as has been and still is repeatedly demonstrated by religious orthodoxies.
This is true also of rigidly held scientific theories, including biological materialism, such as the one advocated by Richard Dawkins,[8] but he accepts the validity of his arguments against the existence of an almighty and all-knowing god creator.
In place of faith or acceptance of scientific theories, if they deny the possibility of the existence of transcendental dimensions of reality because there is no objective proof for them, he applies the philosophical concept of ‘logical probability’.
But to soberly understood principles and arguments contained in the Buddha’s discourses he is inclined to accord a very large measure of logical probability and regards them as suitable guidelines for living ‘in the direction of the meaning of life’.