Skandar Beg, as he was known in Tibet and across the Himalayan region, was born Alexander Csoma in 1784, a Hungarian scholar-adventurer, linguist, philologist, author of the first English/Tibetan dictionary and grammar, and considered the Father of Tibetology. After over a century of confusion and misunderstanding, his publications led to the emergence of Buddhism itself into European consciousness and its subsequent establishment by the end of the 19th century as a world religion within the western sociology of knowledge (Masuzawa 121-44). Csoma's work was primarily linguistic, and during the twenty years he spent in Tibet and India, he codified and published works establishing the Tibetan canon of Buddhist texts (Lussier 1110-20). Remarkably, Csoma remained disengaged from colonial entanglements across the sub-continent (Mukerjee 9), unlike Brian Houghton Hodgson who also, through the transmission of crucial manuscripts and texts (from his official post in Katmandu, Nepal), was a catalyst for the codification of the Buddhist canon in Europe (Lopez 54-7). As reported by several colonial functionaries, Csoma never sealed a single letter during his long residence in monasteries or during his ten-year stay within the basement of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (where he served as occasional librarian and cataloguer for the rapidly growing flow of books and manuscripts arriving in Calcutta). For this reason, he has been revered among the indigenous scholars of the region and their European compatriots alike, which led to a singular honor bestowed upon him long after his death in 1933. Born in the small village of Koros in what is now the Transylvanian region of Romania, into an impoverished family, Csoma's linguistic training began at Bethlenianum College in Nagyenyed (200 miles from his native village), where he spent the next sixteen years (from age 15-31). As Edward Fox suggests, the College (which admitted students solely on their academic merits) was strikingly similar in many ways to the Himalayan Buddhist monasteries in which Csoma would later spend eight years learning the Tibetan language (14). The austere academy was hierarchically organized and competitive, where younger students literally battled for food and knowledge alike. The elementary curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics, formed the foundation of Csoma's linguistic accomplishments, and by the time he died, Csoma had mastered seventeen primary languages and most of the subdialects (Fox 18-21). Five years older than his peers, Csoma was an oddity at the College, but after his first year students and instructors alike recognized his unique combination of drive and intelligence. However, his primary qualities, those that brought him through the College and propelled him, subsequently, through the University of Gottingen and across the world, were a photographic memory and an iron will. The former allowed him to master early on Greek, Latin, and Hebrew--as well as modern French, German, Romanian and Turkish; the latter rendered him impervious to almost any physical hardship, leading most biographers to assert that Csoma, while still a young man, has conquered his own human nature (Fox 17). During Csoma's Nagyenyed years, discernible Romantic influences swept across Hungary where radical thinkers, inspired by the American and French revolutions, began to push for independence from Austria (Mukerjee 12). In typical Romantic fashion, the longing for independence expressed itself [through] a revival of Hungarian culture and language (Fox 19), leading inevitably to unresolved questions regarding origins. To 19th philologists, Hungarian resembled no other European language, showed only a few direct connections to Finnish and Russian, and seemed better connected to the languages of Asia, including Sanskrit. This linguistic isolation from immediate neighbors fired the imagination of cultural nationalists, Csoma included, and they turned eastward to seek the origins of the Hungarian people in the vast spaces of Central Asia (Mishra 139). …
Read full abstract
Sep 1, 2010
Richard B Gunderman 
Open Access
