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  • Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S.J
  • Francis X. Clooney S.J.
Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S.J Translated by Michael J. Sweet. Edited by Leonard Zwilling. (Boston: Wisdom Publications. 2010. Pp. xxvi, 795. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-861-71676-0.)

Among the small number of Westerners who visited Tibet in the eighteenth century and before, most fascinating was Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733). [End Page 619] This Italian Jesuit lived in Lhasa for about five years and was, by all accounts, the first Westerner to learn Tibetan and understand deeply Tibetan culture and religion. His Historical Notices of Tibet, which he wrote and rewrote (in Italian) but never published in his lifetime, is a full account of his experiences, including his slow and arduous journey to India, Nepal, and finally Tibet; his years in those places; as well as his journey home after prematurely leaving Lhasa due to internal missionary disputes. It is a mix of travelogue, history, cultural anthropology, and political analysis; a monument of missionary scholarship; and an early contribution to the study of religions. As such, this new edition and translation will interest a wide range of scholars.

The long book III, “Of the Unique Religion Observed in Tibet, ” well illustrates Desideri’s approach to scholarship. In it, Desideri seeks after the origins of the Tibetan religion and also the mechanisms of power and tradition by which it took root among Tibetans and continued to flourish among them. Throughout, he is the model scholar, committed to accuracy regarding the people to whom he has been sent. He was attentive and subtle; for Desideri, religion was a complex reality, inextricably intertwined with social and political realities, and possessed of a long and complicated history. Explaining a religion, Desideri knew, is more than spinning tales and wished-for scenarios, and requires arduous research. He rejects the widespread but fanciful theories about Tibet and the newly discovered Buddhism, and stayed as close as possible to the facts as he could discover them. Toward the end of part 3, he confesses his own errors in earlier letters he had written and likewise criticizes European scholars—including Athanasius Kircher, S.J. (1601–80), author of the famed China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667)—for wholesale fabrications or, more charitably, for gullibly accepting convenient and entertaining rumors about the East. At the end of the entire treatise, Desideri devotes three important chapters to his plea for “the learning required by missionaries to the Indies” (p. 555).

Yet Desideri, ever the missionary, does not approve of the religion he is studying so carefully, for he judges it to be full of errors—notably two. First, he describes at length the Tibetan view of metempsychosis (rebirth), including the role of good and bad actions, and the facts of the heavens and hells to which the dead temporarily progress before returning to earth. He insists that the Tibetans really believe in rebirth, even as he finds it to be an incredible position to hold. Second, he describes Tibetan atheism and stoutly insists that the Tibetans do not believe in a creator. Nor are they polytheists who merely have a confused idea of God, failing to see the one in the many. Even the saints (konchoks) Tibetans venerate are not true deities but only revered ancestors, kings, and teachers. So, too, their rites, although busy with invocations of various beings, do not support the view that the invoked beings are gods in the Western sense. At best one can find, Desideri suggests, obscure and scattered hints at the mystery of the Trinity. [End Page 620]

Desideri is among the foremost of those missionaries insisting on the need for accurate and deep knowledge of the newly discovered religions and cultures. In the Jesuit context, his great work can be compared only to works such as the Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590) of José Acosta and the Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains Comparées aux Mœurs Des Premiers Temps (Paris, 1724) of Joseph François Lafitau. On another level, the History is valuable, too, for its intimate...

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