Description

Few names in the history of world
scholarship are as remarkable and in
view of his unflinching, ascetic dedi-
cation as venerable as that of Csoma
de Koros. He has been one of Hungary’s heroes because, mainlybhe had made a gift of his life and talents to his country’s search for a new national identity and self-respect and was impelled, when very
young, to travel to Asia to probe,truly heroically, for the origins of his people. In the course of his astoundingly arduous quest which ended only with his death, he opened new doors of knowledge to become the pioneer of Buddhist studies in Europe, the father of what has come to be called Tibetology, the exemplar of a
scholar whose peerless probity was
untainted by colonialist motivations
and pre-conceptions that then marred
much ‘Oriental research. Testimony
to his scientific achievement is his
Tibetan dictionary and Grammar, his
discovery and review of the Great
Buddhist Canon volumes, the Kan-
jur and the Tanjur, and other ancillary but seminal work. He laboured,in fairly impossible conditions, in Himalayan monasteries, and truly hermit-like, in a little corner of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, devoted to his motherland but also to the people among whom he worked and whose languages and culture he studied with love and respect.