An Italian monk in Tibet, 17th century

Couple of days ago, usually I spent my times with searching for old books. In Hungarian libraries almost empty because they didn't have money to buy more volumes. There are too much student in the capital, and they are borrowing most of the interesting books. I started a thesis about the history of the image of Tibet in Western eyes. I found an engraving in China Illustrata about the Potala Palace without its Red Buildings, and the other very interested reflection was written down in Tibetan by an Italian Jesuit father, Ippolito Desideri.
He was the only one European, who bear the Tibetan winter in Lhasa. In 1717 he could buy a house in the Tibetan capital, however, in those days it didn't allow to foreigners, they had just let a room. He learned Tibetan and study the Indo-Tibetan manner of philosophical debate in Sera monastic University. When jungar Mongols attacked the Tibetan capital, he fled to countryside, where he wrote his Tibetan notes about Christianity and he refute the soul theory in reincarnation system.
When the everyday life returned into normal way of course, he presented his paper for his teachers. He was very surprised why the Tibetans change each others in his flat of Lhasa and why they put so much questions to each other?

His account in Italian was published only in the 20th century. In English the Buddhist philosophical parts were omitted. The whole collection of the Jesuits' papers was published in Rome by Luciano Petech.

I can take a look into these Tibetan notes and I can not see what Ippolito realize from the Tibetan Buddhism. He studied five years in the monastery, debated with the Tibetan monks, and all of this just served his mission. I think he had understood nothing from Tibetan philosophy. As he defeated the thought of transmigration it is not present any sign of the realization.
I think it is not his fault. Most of the people in West can't accept the idea of cyclic existence. More precisely I mean when they see what the Buddhist thinks they need time to accustom it. In our Western conditions sometimes can take more than one life, that means there is no real chance to change our way of life and way of thinking because our culture has a lot of presuppositions.

Kwaidan or Ghost Stories

I saw this old Japanese Movie only twice in the last ten years. The original title 怪談 is not only means ghost stories. If you see the two kanjis you can read their elements in backwards: 'fire and fire', 'words to say,' 'earth,' 'heart' and 'again'. With these items Japanese tries to express the strange or obvious things that were told in the ancient times near the fire in the night. It's true that most of these stories in Japan are ghost stories or something similar because they have a lot of words for these creatures, see the following movie in the same year (1964) from Kaneto Shindo (新藤 兼人) Onibaba (鬼婆), or in literature, Akutagawa's story about 'Kappas' and so on. Most of them live under the mirror of the water. When tears fall into this mirror you can call these ghost or they suddenly appear in front of you. In Kwaidan's fourth story the guard drinks an inner reflection with a cup of water.



He sees not himself in the mirror of the cup but a strange, almost onnagata like Japanese face is gibbing at him. (Onnagata is an actor who always appears as a woman in the kabuki plays, and usually he will act this role while he walking in the streets, out of the theater.) And the first kanji 'kai' or 'kwai' put the question mark on these situations. Just like in the Kwaidan. You can think that something is wrong, it is not real, it is just a vision, but so vivid and exact and you talk to him or her, and she replays... and you already spent the night in love with her. The 'kwai' refers to this doubtful and ambiguous situation on the border of the dream and reality.
Hoichi, the Earless is my favorite. When you see his face, it wears a lot of Chinese characters of Heart Sutra. It seems thirty years before Greenaway's Pillow Book. Hoichi's mouth shows the charachter 'shin' or 'kokoro' that means 'heart'.



On his face there are the most famous and well known lines of this Buddhist text: 'the form is empty, the emptiness is the form'. To write a sacred texts on some body is a common practice in South-East Asia. In Thailand they tattoo with a huge iron rod, made big wounds and exorcize the demons, in China or Japan they have very fine inks which have a shine on the skin when they are writing with a brush.