Ippolito Desideri was born in Pistoia in 1684 and began his studies to become a Jesuit in 1700. Years later, he was chosen to lead the Jesuit mission to the remote lands of Tibet. In 1712, he departed from Rome and arrived in 1715 in Ladakh, a small independent kingdom of Tibetan culture. There, thanks to the region’s remarkable religious tolerance, he was free to preach the Christian message and began learning the Tibetan language by conversing with a Mongol princess returning from Lhasa.

The following year, he reached the capital of the Tibetan kingdom, then ruled by Lha-bzang Khan, a sovereign of Mongol origin. Desideri devoted himself with great rigor to the study of the Tibetan language and Buddhism, also known as Lamaism. This study was, of course, driven by his desire to refute that doctrine and demonstrate the superiority of Christianity. During that period, he subsisted solely on traditional Tibetan cha, a tea mixed with yak butter, which he described as “a great nourishment.”

After only a few months of study, he composed a dialogue in Tibetan verse titled “The Dawn is the Sign that the Sun is About to Rise and Dispel the Darkness,” in which he presented the Christian faith. The work was highly appreciated by the sovereign, who intended to organize a debate between Desideri and the learned lamas of the kingdom. However, due to the invasion of the Dzungars in 1717, the project was abandoned.

Unlike many other Jesuit missionaries, Desideri succeeded in fully grasping the nuances of Buddhist philosophy. He translated the meaning of the formula Om Mani Padme Om, which he described as a “magical expression,” and explained the concept of stong pa-nyid, meaning “emptiness.” According to Buddhists, this concept signifies that everything in the universe exists only in dependence upon other things, since nothing exists independently or without deriving from something else. This led the Jesuit to deem Buddhism an “infernal doctrine and diabolical religion,” as the notion of emptiness denied the existence of a self-existent being, namely, God.

In his writings, Desideri also described numerous aspects of Tibetan society and culture, such as polyandry, the funerary custom of offering corpses to vultures, and the search for the future Dalai Lama among children. In 1721, Propaganda Fide entrusted the Tibetan mission to three Capuchins, forcing Desideri to leave the country for good. His work is now regarded as the beginning of Tibetology in the West and a pivotal moment of intellectual encounter between East and West.