Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa, and: “More than the Promised Land”: Letters and Relations from Tibet by the Jesuit Missionary António de Andrade (1580–1634) by Michael J. Sweet (review)

The study of the Catholic missions that accompanied late medieval and early modern European expansion has been something of a growth industry of late, touching even popular culture through films such as Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe (1991) and Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). Though the missions to Tibet have yet to make it onto the screen, a small but steady flow of new scholarship in English has begun to make knowledge and understanding of them available to interested readers who may not be specialists in either Tibetan studies or missiology. Above all, two titles devoted to the voyage of Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), a Jesuit originally from Pistoia in Tuscany, have brought renewed attention to that noteworthy figure, whose five-year residence in and around Lhasa (1716–1721) was at the heart of a remarkable memoir that came to light in 1875, a century and a half after his death.¹

Besides his account of his travels, Desideri also left behind a substantial and surprising collection of original writing in Tibetan, a testimony to the herculean efforts he made to master the Tibetan language and the intricacies of Buddhist dogmatics. These writings became the object of sustained study for the first time in the work of Father Giuseppe Toscano S. X. (Societas Xaverii [Xaverian Missionary Fathers]; 1911–2003).² Certainly the greatest of Desideri scholars, Toscano’s many contributions include the elaboration of a specialized lexicon (entitled “Glossario Desideriano”) in which Toscano sought to specify the precise relationships between traditional Catholic terminology and Desideri’s Tibetan usage.³

Lopez and Jinpa’s attractive, readable selection of Desideri’s Tibetan writings may be recommended without hesitation to readers wishing to delve into the Italian Jesuit’s attempts to grapple with the intellectual and spiritual alterity with which Tibetan Buddhism confronted him. As such, it serves as a welcome complement to Trent Pomplun’s Jesuit on the Roof of the World, which concerns primarily Desideri’s biography and historical context. Lopez and Jinpa present two of Desideri’s Tibetan works: Inquiry Concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness (Mgo skar gyi bla ma yi po li do zhes bya ba 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), a sprawling text from which extracts are translated (pp. 78–149); and Essence of the Christian Religion (Ke ri se sti an gyi chos lugs kyi snying po), translated in Dispelling the Darkness in its entirety (pp. 192–250). Each of these translations is preceded by an introductory chapter (chaps. 1 and 3). A general introduction (pp. 1–29) situates Desideri and his opus overall. The translations are admirably clear and fluid throughout; they succeed in conveying the sense of Desideri’s writings as they might have been received by the educated Tibetan readers for whom they were intended (but who in fact never saw them). Desideri’s writings are not for the faint of heart, however: Desideri was educated in the scholastic philosophy of his day, and he sought to express himself in accord with the conventions of Tibetan Buddhist scholasticism. Lopez and Jinpa, in their introduction to the Inquiry, supply a helpful guide to the resulting intricacies.

My complaints about Dispelling the Darkness are few, but two must be mentioned. First, there is no attempt, on the part of Lopez and Jinpa...