Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit's Quest For the Soul of Tibet by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa (review)

In 1952, the Italian Orientalist Luciano Petech (1914–2010) supervised the publication of a series of writings by Capuchin and Jesuit missionaries who had lived and worked throughout the Himalayan region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This collection of seven volumes, under the title I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal (in the series Il Nuovo Ramusio), included the Relazione by the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), here made available for the first time to a broader public, or at least to those select readers, who could appreciate and enjoy Desideri's Italian style—a masterful example of Baroque rhetoric sustained over hundreds of pages of prose.

Desideri was born in the town of Pistoia in Tuscany in 1684, and joined the Society of Jesus in 1700. He then moved to Rome to study at the Collegio Romano, and went through the usual academic training that was typical for the Jesuits at the time—a systematic study of the Summa and other scholastic manuals, but also of rhetoric and composition, as well as geography, history, and what we would now call political science. In 1712, Desideri chose to join the missions, and in November of that year he embarked on a long journey that would take him to Goa—the center of the Portuguese colonial empire in the Indies—and from there finally to Tibet. Leaving Ladakh in the summer of 1715, Desideri finally reached Lhasa on March 18, 1716. He would remain in Tibet until late 1721, when a decree from the Vatican Congregation De Propaganda Fide informed him that the mission to Tibet had been assigned to the Capuchins, and therefore he, as a Jesuit, had no right to remain there. Eager to appeal this decision, Desideri left Tibet to return to Rome, though he lingered for five more years in southern India before returning to Italy in late 1727. Desideri's final years were marked by ultimately unsuccessful attempts to overturn the decision of the Vatican Congregation, while also editing his Relazione (also known as Notizie Storiche) for publication. Unfortunately, Desideri's untimely death in 1733 prevented him from completing his work and from ever returning to Tibet to resume his mission.

The Relazione appeared in an English translation in 2012—the labor of love of Michael Sweet and Leonard Zwilling, who not only made the text available in English for the first time, but also supplemented it with an extensive introduction presenting Desideri's work within the context of the great missions to Asia of the early modern era. A few years before the publication of this volume, Trent Pomplun's Jesuit on the Roof of the World already included extensive excerpts of the Relazione, as well as an introduction to the theological questions that moved Desideri to engage in dialogue with Tibetan Buddhism. While the Relazione contains a vast amount of ethno-graphic and historical information—Desideri witnessed the Mongol looting of Lhasa in 1717 that marked the end of the reign of his protector Lhazang Khan—the bulk of Desi deri's discussion of Buddhism is found in his Tibetan writings, possibly the sole example of a series of speculative treatises composed in Classical Tibetan by a non-Tibetan.

Desideri's extant Tibetan works include five volumes: Tho rangs (The dawn), Ke ri se sti yaṇ gyi cho lugs kyi snying po (The essence of the Christian religion), 'Byung khung (The origin of all sentient beings), Nges legs (The highest and ultimate good), and finally, his magnum opus, bearing the impressive title Mgo skar gyi bla ma i po li do zhes by aba yis phul ba'i bod kyi mkhas pa rnams la skye ba snga ma dang stong pa nyid kyi lta ba'i sgo nas zhu ba (Inquiry concerning the doctrines of previous lives and of emptiness, offered to the scholars of Tibet...