Customer Reviews

Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to Tibet

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The strength of this book is in the immense detail that goes into situating Desideri in his cultural, historical and theological context. It also gives a critical reading of his reports against other documents from the time, showing that the way he presents things is not always exact. All of this was very helpful and added greatly to my understanding of the Jesuit missionary.

However, having been interested in Desideri for nearly three decades, I already know the story. The odd thing about him is that while everyone goes on about how engaging was his dialogue with Tibetan Buddhism, no one gives you details to decide for yourself. This book, for example, while the reviews and description bring his story up as a "seminal moment in...interreligious dialogue" with "the first Christian intellectual to engage Tibetan Buddhism on its own terms" showing a "dramatic encounter between [Desideri's] Jesuit philosophy and the scholasticism of the Geluk monks" leaves us nearly completely in the dark about the details, yet again. I find this typical of discussions about Desideri; even English translations of his own writings leave out these sections.

What this book does cover, instead, are Christian theological issues and the details are about doctrinal and procedural debates between different Christian groups, predominantly the Jesuits and the Capuchins. We are repeatedly brought to the door of Desideri's opinions about why he disagreed with Buddhism, but are not really let inside. More than once we are drawn into the fact that he greatly disagreed with the idea of rebirth, enough so that he wrote a large document on the subject, but we are not told any details of why he disagreed with it or what arguments he put forward against it. The only hint, in another context, is that he felt the Dalai Lamas used it as a social control mechanism. Surely there has to be more to it than that. Again, more than once we are drawn in to Desideri's study with Buddhists in monastic settings, where it is clearly shown that he was reading the right books and had a special interest in Madhyamaka, even though he disagreed with aspects of it. Other than that part of the disagreement centered on the denial of a Creator God by Madhyamika authors, we are given no idea of the details of this incredibly interesting worldview encounter. Pomplun knows the details enough to mention, more than once, that Desideri had some strange ideas about Madhyamaka, but, again, no details. And all this in a book with a chapter titled "Tibetan Religion in Theological Perspective," which is one of the main reasons I bought it.

Readers can be excused for starting to wonder if the emperor has no clothes. At one point, Pomplun notes that, despite Desideri's claim that many Tibetan intellectuals came to read his refutation of Buddhist doctrines, there is no reference to this in any contemporary Tibetan accounts. Is it because they didn't find anything of real substance? ;) Someone needs to write a book on what Desideri actually wrote on the subject and the arguments he used. Perhaps Michael Sweet's upcoming book or the one Pomplun says he wants to write next on Desideri's Tibetan documents, will finally fill the gap for those of us who neither read Tibetan or Italian nor have easy access to the journals where some of this work is starting to appear.

Either way, if none of that is your concern, than this book will not disappoint your quest to understand Desideri in a more thorough manner. It reveals the man at his best and worst, as well as disbanding a number of romantic myths about both him and Tibetan culture. If you have any interest in Desideri, it is rich in historical detail and well worth your time. Each of the six chapters is a self-contained unit focusing on a major issue in his life, picked up in chronological order. We are given a detailed examination of his Jesuit background, the literary context of his writing style, a general overview of how he situated Tibetan Buddhism in relationship to Catholicism, his understanding of the Tibetan politics during his visit, his theological disputes with other Christian groups, and how all of this fits into the European cultural context of his time. By the time you are done the introduction, you will clearly see that Pomplun is not going to get into the issues that interested me. Too bad the Amazon preview cuts off before then.