Ippolito Desideri (21 December 1684 – 14 April 1733) was an Italian Jesuit missionary and traveller and the most famous of the early European missionaries to found Catholic Church in Tibet. He was also the first documented Tibetologist and the first European to have successfully studied both Classical and Standard Tibetan.
Biography
Desideri was born in 1684 to a fairly prosperous family in Pistoia, Tuscany. He was educated from childhood in the Jesuit school in Pistoia, and in 1700 was selected to attend the Collegio Romano (Roman College) in Rome. From 1706 to 1710 he taught literature at the Jesuit colleges in Orvieto and Arezzo, and later at the Collegio Romano itself.
Journey to Tibet
His application for the Indies mission was accepted by the Father-General of the Society of Jesus, Michelangelo Tamburini, in 1712, and he was assigned to reopen the Tibetan mission, which was under the jurisdiction of the Jesuit Province of Goa. Desideri left Rome on 27 September 1712, and embarked for the India from Lisbon aboard a Portuguese vessel, arriving in Goa one year later. From Goa he traveled to Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajasthan and Delhi, arriving in Agra (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 to Srinagar in Kashmir (where they were delayed for six months, and Desideri suffered a nearly fatal intestinal illness), and from Kashmir to Leh, capital of Ladakh, arriving there at the end of June, 1715. According to Desideri, they were well received by the Gyalpo, 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, Freyre, who insisted that they travel onward instead to Central Tibet and Lhasa.
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, via Kathmandu and Patna, leaving Fr. Desideri in charge of the mission. He was the only European missionary in Tibet, at that time.
Settling down in Lhasa
Soon after arriving in Lhasa, Desideri was received in audience by the Mongol Khan of Tibet, Lhasang Khan, who gave him permission to rent a house in Lhasa and to both practice and teach Christianity. After reading Desideri's first work in Tibetan, on the basics of Roman Catholic doctrine, Lasang Khan advised him to improve his knowledge of the Tibetan language and to also study Tibetan literature. After some months of intensive study he entered the Sera Buddhist monastery, one of the three great educational centers of the politically involved Gelukpa sect. There he studied and debated with Tibetan Buddhist monks and scholars, and was permitted to offer the Tridentine Mass at a Roman Catholic altar in his rooms. He learned the Classical Tibetan literary language (unknown to Europeans before) and became a voracious student of Tibetan literature, philosophy, and culture.
At the end of 1717 he was forced to leave Lhasa due to the unrest caused by the invasion of Tibet by the Dzungar Khanate. He retired to the Capuchin hospice in Dakpo 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 Tibetan literary language, in which he sought to refute the philosophical concepts of rebirth (which he referred to as "metempsychosis") and Nihilism or 'Emptiness' (Wylie: stong pa nyid; Sanskrit: Śūnyatā), which he felt most prevented conversions from Tibetan Buddhism to the Catholic Church in Tibet. In his books Fr. Desideri also adopted and utilized multiple philosophical techniques from Tibetan literature for scholastic argumentation. He also used multiple quotations from the Buddhist scriptures to argue his case and praised those elements of Tibetan Buddhism, especially in its moral philosophy, that are not contradictory to Roman Catholicism.