A Scholarly Imprint: How Tibetan Astronomers Brought Jesuit Astronomy to Tibet

Abstract

The European Jesuits’ mission to China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is considered a world-historical event that played an important role in the transmission of knowledge between the West and the East. In spite of its historical significance, it was long assumed that the Jesuit mission to China and its scientific scholarship had never reached the mountainous regions of Tibet. As I have described elsewhere, this was not the case. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Tibetans not only translated a large number of the Jesuits’ works into Tibetan, they also reformed the Tibetan calendar in accordance with the Jesuit-influenced calendar of the Qing. How did it happen and in which way? It was a twofold process achieved partially with Qing imperial sponsorship and partially on the Tibetans’ own initiative, sometimes even in a low-key, indirect and secretive way. In this article, I shall look at how a Tibetan Buddhist astronomer at the imperial court in Beijing wrote a manual for predicting solar and lunar eclipses. I will also look at how some Tibetan astronomers brought this imperial knowledge, apparently without explicit imperial approval, to the monasteries in Amdo, the North-East of Tibet, which mostly lies today in the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu, as well as how Tibetan astronomers in this region reformed their calendars according to the Jesuits’ astronomical system. Finally, I will describe how this tradition, in spite of recent political upheaval and tragedies, is still alive and practiced in Tibet.