Ippolito Desideri

• 1. Introduction

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  Ippolito Desideri, an Italian Jesuit from Tuscany, died in the Collegio Romano in Rome in April 1733. He was only 48, and he was still hoping to return to Tibet. He is remembered as the first documented Tibetologist, and as the first European to study both Classical and Standard Tibetan successfully. In the early eighteenth century he traveled from Rome to Lhasa and studied inside one of Tibet's great monastic universities. How did a teacher of literature from Pistoia end up debating Buddhist monks in their own literary language? Why did his own Church order him out of the country he worked so hard to understand? And why did the world wait so long to read what he wrote?

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• 2. A Jesuit Education

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  Pistoia, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, was where Desideri was born on the 21st of December 1684. Grand Duke Cosimo III of the House of Medici ruled the duchy at the time, and the boy's family was fairly prosperous. Desideri studied at the Jesuit school in Pistoia from childhood. In 1700 he was chosen to attend the Collegio Romano in Rome.

  Teaching came next. From 1706 to 1710 he taught literature at the Jesuit colleges in Orvieto and Arezzo, and later at the Collegio Romano itself. In 1712 the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Michelangelo Tamburini, accepted his application for the East Indies mission. Desideri was assigned to revive a long-dormant mission to Tibet, which remained under the Society's Province of Goa.

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• 3. The Road to Lhasa

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  On the 27th of September 1712, Desideri left Rome. He sailed from Lisbon for Portuguese India and reached the port of Goa a year later. From there he went north through Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajasthan and Delhi. He arrived in Agra, the seat of the Jesuit mission in Northern India, on the 15th of September 1714.

  Desideri then returned to Delhi, where he met his superior and travel companion, the Portuguese Jesuit Manoel Freyre. Together they went to Srinagar in Kashmir and were held there for six months. During the delay Desideri suffered an intestinal illness that nearly killed him. They reached Leh, the capital of Ladakh, at the end of June 1715.

  Desideri later wrote that the Gyalpo, the king of Ladakh, and his court welcomed them well. He wanted to stay and found a mission there. Freyre outranked him and insisted that they continue to Central Tibet and Lhasa, so Desideri obeyed.

  The crossing of the Tibetan plateau lasted seven months, all of it in winter. The two priests were ill-prepared and inexperienced, and they probably survived only because of a woman named Casal. She was a Mongol governor and the widow of the previous governor of Western Tibet, and she was leaving her post to return to Lhasa. The priests traveled with her armed caravan and arrived in Lhasa on the 18th of March 1716.

  A few weeks later Freyre set off back to India by way of Kathmandu and Patna. That left Desideri as the only European missionary in Tibet.

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• 4. Student of Tibetan

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  Lhasang Khan, the Mongol Khan of Tibet, received Desideri in audience soon after he arrived. The Khan allowed him to rent a house in Lhasa and to practice and preach Christianity there. Desideri wrote his first work in Tibetan, a short explanation of the basics of Roman Catholic doctrine. After reading it, the Khan told him to improve his Tibetan and to study Tibetan literature.

  Desideri took the advice seriously. After some months of intensive study he entered the Sera monastery. Sera was one of the three great monastic universities of the Gelukpa sect, which was then politically ascendant. Inside its walls he studied with Tibetan Buddhist monks and scholars and debated with them. He was also permitted to celebrate the Tridentine Mass at a Roman Catholic altar in his rooms.

  The result was a language no European had learned before. Desideri mastered the Classical Tibetan literary language and became a voracious reader of Tibetan literature, philosophy and culture. That knowledge would soon become the weapon he used in his arguments.

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• 5. Debating Emptiness

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  At the end of 1717 the Dzungar Khanate invaded Tibet, and the unrest forced Desideri to leave Lhasa. He retired to the Capuchin hospice in Dakpo province, in South Central Tibet. He still came back to Lhasa for long stays in 1719 and 1720.

  Between 1718 and 1721 he composed five works in Classical Tibetan. In them he attacked two ideas that he believed did the most to prevent Tibetan Buddhists from converting to Catholicism. One was rebirth, which he called "metempsychosis". The other was the doctrine of emptiness, known in Tibetan as stong pa nyid and in Sanskrit as Śūnyatā, which he treated as a form of nihilism.

  His method was to fight on Tibetan ground. He borrowed several techniques of scholastic argument from Tibetan literature and quoted from the dharma and the vinaya. He also set the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas against the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna, to argue for "the superiority of Christian theology."

  The last of those years, 1721, also brought an order that no argument could answer.

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• 6. Rivals in the Mission

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  In 1703 the Propaganda Fide, the branch of Church administration that controlled Catholic missionary work worldwide, had granted the Tibetan mission to Italian Capuchins. Three of them reached Lhasa in October 1716. They quickly showed Desideri documents that they said proved their exclusive right to the mission.

  Desideri rejected the charge that he had disobeyed the Propaganda Fide, and both sides sent complaints to Rome. Meanwhile he helped the newcomers adjust to life in Tibet. The Capuchins had no quarrel with him personally. They feared, however, that more Jesuits would follow and push them out of Tibet and Nepal, so they petitioned for his expulsion.

  In January 1721 Desideri received the order to leave Tibet and return to India. He stayed a long time at Kuti, on the border between Tibet and Nepal, before reaching Agra again in 1722.

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• 7. Service and Defense

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  Back at Agra, Desideri was named head pastor of the Catholic community in Delhi, the capital of the Mughal Empire. He organized schooling and services for the community. He also had a new church built to replace the old, dilapidated one.

  In 1725 he moved to the Pondicherry mission of the French Jesuits and began learning Tamil. Two years later he was sent to Rome to promote the beatification of John de Britto, a Jesuit who had died as a martyr in South India. He took his extensive notes on Tibet with him. Aboard a French ship, still on the way home, he began writing his Relation. Its latest manuscript carries the title "Historical Notices of Tibet", or Notizie Istoriche del Tibet.

  He landed in France in August 1727. There he met important cardinals and aristocrats and had an audience with King Louis XV. He arrived in Rome in January 1728 and took up residence in the Jesuit professed house.

  Most of his time there went to the legal case at the Propaganda Fide. Desideri represented the Jesuits, and Fr. Felice di Montecchio fiercely defended the Capuchins. Desideri wrote three Defenses of the Jesuit position. On the 29th of November 1732 the Propaganda issued a terse final order. It confirmed the exclusive right of the Capuchin friars to the Tibet mission and forbade any further discussion of the matter.

  Desideri had also been revising the Relation for publication. A direct order of the Propaganda forbade that, just as it forbade his return to Tibet. The dispute had run for nearly five years, from his arrival in Rome until that final order.

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• 8. Pages Buried in Archives

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  After Desideri's death, his manuscripts in several languages sat unread in the Jesuit archives and in a private collection. They held the first accurate account of Tibetan geography, government and agriculture. They also described Tibetan customs, along with Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and religious belief. None of it came to light until the late nineteenth century.

  Luciano Petech then edited the Relation, and a complete edition appeared in the 1950s, in volumes of his series on Italian missionaries in Tibet and Nepal. English readers had to wait longer. An abridged translation was published in 1937, and a complete one appeared only in 2010. That was "Mission to Tibet", translated by Michael Sweet, edited by Leonard Zwilling and published by Wisdom Publications. Giuseppe Toscano edited his Tibetan works in four volumes between 1981 and 1989.

  The five works he wrote in Classical Tibetan are now being translated. Guido Stucco's "When Thomas Aquinas met Nagarjuna" appeared in 2016. In 2017 Harvard University Press published "Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit's Quest for the Soul of Tibet", translated and edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa.

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