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The history of missionaries in Tibet is an interesting one. Like the textbook, some of the earliest Western accounts of Tibet come from missionaries. The first European to describe Tibet was the Jesuit missionary, Ippolito Desideri. He travelled to Tibet in the 18th century and met the great Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan. Desideri’s account contains two points I find fascinating. First, the Khan patiently listened to Desideri as he pitched Christianity as an option of faith. The Mongol empire was multi-cultural and polyethnic and the Khan pragmatically explored the beliefs of a variety of religions. He ultimately rebuffed Desideri on the grounds that the rituals of the Tibetan lamas were particularly effective.

Second, Desideri was shocked by what he encountered in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. It was eerily like Rome. The Dalai lama and his court of lamas, dressed in red robes and tall yellow hats, looked uncannily like the Pope with his cardinals. Added to this, the rigourous scholasticism of the Tibetan monks was not unlike that of the Jesuits. Not surprisingly, the Jesuits produced some of the earliest accounts of Tibetan Buddhist teachings as well as their rebuttals.

Interestingly, there are a host of doctrinal parallels between Buddhism and Christianity although I’m not sure how Desideri and the Jesuits addressed them. Both Buddhist and Christian cosmologies believe in life after death. Both posit the existence of types of heaven and types of hell. Buddhist accounts, like Dante’s Inferno, discuss different types of hot and cold hells in lovingly gory detail. Both believe in the effects of positive and negative moral action. Both offer strategies to avoid hell and potentially get into the heavens.