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The Reverend Ippolito Desideri SJ | |
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Ippolito Desideri, SJ (21 December 1684Pistoia,Grand Duchy of Tuscany – 14 April 1733Rome,Papal States)[1] was an ItalianJesuit missionary and traveller and the most famous of the early European missionaries who foundedCatholic Church in Tibet.[2] He was also the first documentedTibetologist and the firstEuropean to have successfully studied bothClassical andStandard Tibetan.
Desideri was born in 1684 to a fairly prosperous family atPistoia, in theGrand Duchy of Tuscany, which was then under the rule ofGrand Duke Cosimo III of theHouse of Medici.[3] Desideri was educated from childhood in the Jesuit school in Pistoia, and in 1700 was selected to attend theCollegio Romano (Roman College) in Rome. From 1706 to 1710 he taught literature at the Jesuit colleges inOrvieto andArezzo, and later at the Collegio Romano itself.
His application for the East Indies mission was accepted by theSuperior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr.Michelangelo Tamburini, in 1712, and he was assigned to reopen the long dormantJesuit Mission to Tibet [fr], which remained under the jurisdiction of the Society's Province ofGoa. Desideri left Rome on 27 September 1712, and embarked fromLisbon forPortuguese India, arriving at the port of Goa one year later. From Goa he traveled toSurat,Ahmedabad,Rajasthan andDelhi, arriving inAgra (the seat of the Jesuit mission in Northern India) on 15 September 1714. From there he returned to Delhi, where he met his superior and travel companion, the Portuguese Jesuit Manoel Freyre. Together they traveled from Delhi toSrinagar inKashmir (where they were delayed for six months, and Desideri suffered a nearly fatal intestinal illness), and from Kashmir toLeh, capital ofLadakh, arriving there at the end of June, 1715. According to Desideri, they were well received by theGyalpo, or King, of Ladakh and his court, and he wished to remain there to found a mission, but he was forced to obey his Superior, Fr. Freyre, who insisted that they travel onward instead intoCentral Tibet andLhasa.
They thus undertook a perilous seven months winter journey across the Tibetan plateau; ill-prepared and inexperienced, their very survival was likely due to the help they received from Casal, the Mongol governor (and widow of the previous governor of Western Tibet), who was leaving her post and returning to Lhasa. They journeyed with her armed caravan, and finally arrived in Lhasa on 18 March 1716. After a few weeks, Fr. Freyre returned to India, viaKathmandu andPatna, leaving Fr. Desideri in charge of the mission. He was the only European missionary in Tibet, at that time.
Soon after arriving in Lhasa, Desideri was received in audience by theMongol Khan of Tibet,Lhasang Khan, who gave him permission to rent a house in Lhasa and to both practice and preach Christianity. After reading Desideri's first work in Tibetan, explaining the basics of Roman Catholic doctrine, Lasang Khan advised him to improve his knowledge of the Tibetan language and to also studyTibetan literature. After some months of intensive study he entered theSera Buddhist monastery, one of the three greatmonastic universities of the politically ascendantGelukpa sect. There he both studied and debated with Tibetan Buddhist monks and scholars, and was permitted to offer theTridentine Mass at a Roman Catholic altar in his rooms. He learned theClassical Tibetanliterary language (unknown to Europeans before) and became a voracious student of Tibetan literature, philosophy, andculture.
At the end of 1717 he was forced to leave Lhasa due to the unrest caused by theinvasion of Tibet by theDzungar Khanate. He retired to theCapuchin hospice inDakpo province, in South Central Tibet, although he did return to Lhasa for considerable periods during the period 1719–1720. Between 1718 and 1721 he composed five works in the Classical Tibetanliterary language, in which he sought to refute the philosophical concepts ofrebirth (which he referred to as "metempsychosis") andNihilism or 'Emptiness' (Wylie:stong pa nyid; Sanskrit:Śūnyatā), which he felt most prevented conversions fromTibetan Buddhism to theCatholic Church in Tibet. In his books Fr. Desideri also adopted and utilized multiple philosophical techniques fromTibetan literature for scholastic argumentation. Fr. Desideri also used multiple quotations from thedharma andvinaya, and even brought theScholasticism of St.Thomas Aquinas into a debate with the nihilisticMadhyamaka philosophy ofNagarjuna to argue his case for "the superiority of Christian theology."[4]
Italian missionaries of the Capuchin Order had been granted the Tibetan mission in 1703 by thePropaganda Fide, the branch of the Church administration that controlled Catholic missionary activity worldwide. Three Capuchins arrived in Lhasa in October 1716, and promptly presented documents to Desideri that they claimed confirmed their exclusive right to the Tibetan mission by the Propaganda. Desideri contested the charge of disobedience to the Propaganda Fide, and both sides complained to Rome. In the meantime Desideri helped his Capuchin co-religionists in acclimating to Tibet. While the Capuchins had no quarrel with Desideri personally, they feared that other Jesuits would follow and displace them from Tibet and Nepal, and they petitioned for his expulsion from the country. In January 1721, Desideri received the order to leave Tibet and return to India. After a long stay in Kuti, at the Tibetan-Nepali border, he returned to Agra in 1722.
At Agra, Desideri was appointed head pastor of the Catholic community in theMughal Empire's capital city ofDelhi. He organized education and services for the community, and had a new church built to replace the former dilapidated edifice. In 1725 he went to theFrench JesuitSyro-Malabar Church mission inPondicherry, and set to work learning theTamil language and carrying on the mission there. In 1727 he was sent to Rome to promote the cause of the beatification ofJohn de Britto, a Jesuit who had died a martyr in South-India. He took along his very extensive notes on Tibet, its culture and religion, and began work on hisRelation, which in its latest manuscript was called "Historical Notices of Tibet" (Notizie Istoriche del Tibet) while still homeward bound on a French vessel. He landed in France in August 1727, and after a stay in that country, where he met with important cardinals andaristocrats and had an audience withKing Louis XV, he arrived in Rome in January 1728. He took up residence in the Jesuitprofessed house, and his time was fully occupied in the legal proceedings at the Propaganda Fide between himself, representing the Jesuit order, and Fr. Felice di Montecchio, who fiercely defended the Capuchin case; Desideri wrote three Defenses of the Jesuit position. On 29 November 1732, the Propaganda issued its final terse order on the matter, confirming the exclusive right of the Capuchin Friars to the Tibet mission, and forbidding any further discussion on the subject.
Fr. Desideri had been working during this time on revising theRelation and was preparing it for publication, which, like his return to Tibet, was also forbidden by a direct Propaganda order. While still hoping for the reversal of the order and the opportunity to return to Tibet, Fr. Ippolito Desideri died unexpectedly at the age of only 48-years, in the Collegio Romano on 13 April 1733.[5]
Manuscripts of his monumental works in multiple languages, comprising the first accurate account of Tibetan geography, government, agriculture, customs, andTibetan Buddhist philosophy and religious belief, were buried in the Jesuit archives and a private collection, and did not come to light until the late 19th century; theRelation finally appeared in a complete edition by Luciano Petech which was published in the 1950s. An abridged English translation was published in 1937, and a complete translation appeared only in 2010.
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