A central figure in Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit's Quest for the Soul of Tibet, the Italian Jesuit priest Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), is best known for two achievements. First, he arrived in Lhasa in March 1716 and reopened the Christian mission in Tibet after the first attempt to establish a mission there by António de Andrade (1580–1634) ended after only a brief time. Second, Desideri studied in monasteries in Ramoché and Sera and produced a number of writings on Buddhism and Christianity in Tibetan and European languages. Missionaries and Christians in Japan and China frequently discussed and criticized Buddhism in their writings, including, for example, Alessandro Valignano's Nihon no katekizumo 日本のカテキズモ (Catechism of Japan) and Matteo Ricci's Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義 (The true meaning of the Lord of Heaven). However, according to an article by the Buddhist scholar Ocho Enichi 横超 慧日, the missionaries’ conceptions of important Buddhist terms, such as emptiness (śūnyatā) in Tianzhu Shiyi, are Confucianized, indicating that they had obtained their knowledge of Buddhism from Confucian literati.Footnote ¹ It appears that the missionaries in Japan delved into Buddhism at a deeper level than their colleagues in China because Buddhism had deeper roots in Japanese society than any other religion or philosophy. They used a variety of terms derived from Buddhism not only to criticize Buddhism but also to translate Christianity into the local language.Footnote ²

Desideri, however, was himself trained in Tibetan monasteries and delved deeper into Buddhism than any of his predecessors in China and Japan. According to previous research, Desideri eagerly studied Buddhist terminology and methods of argumentation and used them to translate scholastic philosophical and Christian terms.Footnote ³ What actual terminology and methods of argumentation methods did he use? And how did he apply them to his translations of Christian concepts? Dispelling the Darkness provides us with precious and essential information for a discussion of these questions through its English translations of his two Tibetan texts, Inquiry Concerning the Doctrines of Previous Lives and Emptiness, Offered to the Scholars of Tibet by the Star Head Lama called Ippolito (Mgo skar gyi bla ma I po li do zhes by aba yis phul ba'i bod kyi mkhas pa rnams la skye ba snga ma dang stong pa nyid kyi lta ba'i sgo nas zhu ba) and Essence of the Christian Religion (Ke ri se sti yan gyi chos lugs kyi snying po), and its detailed commentary. Desideri's reports in Italian have been discussed in English for almost a century and translated into English (the English translation has been also retranslated into other languages, including Japanese). However, his Tibetan works remained largely unknown until Giuseppe Toscano translated four of them into Italian in the 1980s, and there have scarcely been any English-language translations of these works. This book offers a detailed investigation of how Desideri tried to convince Tibetan scholars of the deficiency of two central teachings of Buddhism, rebirth (saṃsāra) and emptiness, and of the superiority of Christianity, employing a variety of terminology, metaphors, and styles of argumentation derived from Tibetan Buddhist texts, which he redefined and recast for his purposes. The content of Dispelling the Darkness provides plenty of fascinating information not only for scholars of Christianity or Buddhism in Tibet, but also for scholars, unfamiliar with the Tibetan language, researching the fields of Christian missions active in neighboring countries such as China and Japan.

Some examples of Desideri's use of Buddhist terminology and styles of argumentation in a Christian context will demonstrate his methodology. Desideri employs the imagery of “the seed and the soil” familiar to Buddhists and writes that “the seed that is religion produces sprouts of both virtuous and non-virtuous deeds” (p. 49) and that “the two types of deeds and the two types of fruit that are based upon a mindful awareness that serve as a kind of life-force called ‘mind,’ ‘mental faculty,’ or ‘consciousness,’ become totally non-existent” (p. 50). Here Desideri appears to imply that the true referent of these three basic Buddhist terms, “mind” (sems), “mental faculty” (yid), and “consciousness” (rnam par shes pa) as equivalent names for “life-force” (srog) is the Christian soul (p. 50). He not only adopts Buddhist terminology as above, but also uses Buddhist styles of argumentation, such as a conversational tone similar to such genres of Tibetan Buddhist literature as mtha’ dpyod (critical analysis) and zin bris (notes) (p. 24).

Moreover, and rather interestingly, the authors of Dispelling the Darkness point out that Desideri's adoption of Buddhist vocabulary, metaphors, and styles of argumentation are related to the historical context during which Desideri studied at Tibetan monasteries. The texts of Tsong kha pa (1357–1419), the founder of the Geluk order, such as Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Byang chub lam rim chen mo), are frequently referenced by Desideri. Furthermore, his understanding of Buddhist doctrines, especially emptiness, is “derived above all from Tsong kha pa” (p. 158). Other orders were often critical of Tsong kha pa's arguments, but his views “gained new authority and orthodoxy” when the fifth Dalai Lama ascended the throne of Tibet in 1642 (p. 157).

Although the accommodation strategy described above that Desideri thoroughly applied in his texts is highly appealing, a question inevitably arises: how did Desideri distinguish Christianity from Buddhism? The more one fully accommodates Christianity to Buddhism, the greater the risk of one being subsumed into the other or of Christianity being seen as simply an imitation of Buddhism. As is well known, the first generation of Jesuit missionaries in Japan widely used such Buddhist terms as Dainichi 大日 and Tenjiku 天竺 in their missionary efforts and were thereby regarded by local people as a new sect of Buddhism. Buddhist monks in Japan and China, such as Yunxi Zhuhong 雲棲袾宏 and Sessō Sōsai 雪窓宗雀, criticized Christianity as an imitator of “Brahman infidels 梵天外道”, and claimed that Christian teachings were plagiarized from Buddhist texts.Footnote ⁴ In addition, it has been pointed out that missionaries in Japan were acutely aware of superficial similarities between some key concepts of Buddhism and Christianity, such as Heaven and Hell, sin and glory.Footnote ⁵ Although relatively few sections of Dispelling the Darkness deal with this point, the authors state that Desideri does not translate specific Christian terms such as Jesus Christ, Mary, and Christian into the Tibetan language; instead, he provided transliterations of these terms. The use of both translation and transliteration is also common in the texts of missionaries in Asia, which provides a clue as to how to find the subtle boundary between accommodation and differentiation.

It would be more difficult to answer the question of how to evaluate the historical significance of Desideri's Tibetan writings. According to Dispelling the Darkness, Desideri made very few converts in Tibet and no reference to Desideri's presence or his influence is found in any Tibetan historical source from the period. The careful deciphering and rendering of Desideri's Tibetan texts in this book will undoubtedly inspire many scholars, and future research should answer this question.