JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES

January-March 2011 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume III., Issue 1.
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itself. Csoma determined to penetrate that unknown land. Moorcroft furnished him with letters and some
rupees. The Hungarian, on his side, pledged himself to bring back results that would repay the outlay,
and the two friends parted in Kashmir, never again to meet in this world. The solitary scholar plunged
into the north-eastern mountains. From June 1823 to October 1824 he studied Tibetan with a learned
priest, or Lama, in the Buddhist monastery of Yangla.
During half the year the cold at that altitude is intense. Even on midsummer day snow had fallen, and
the ground was again sheeted with white before the crops were cut in September. In winter the doors
were blocked with snow, and the thermometer ranged below zero. Throughout four months Csoma sat
with his Lama in a cell nine feet square, neither of them daring to stir out, with no fire, with no light after
dark, with only the ground to sleep on, and the bare walls of the building as their sole defence against the
deadly cold. Wrapped in a sheepskin cloak, his arms folded tightly across his breast to keep in the last
sparks of his animal heat, Csoma read from daybreak to dark, and then relapsed into night for the next
fourteen hours. To put forth his hand for a moment from its fleecy shelter was an enterprise of pain and of
danger. But before the end of winter he grew quite dexterous in turning over his pages, without getting
his forefinger frostbitten.
Of his sufferings Csoma could never be got to speak one word. His reticence as to the hairbreadth
escapes and personal privations of his long solitude in Central Asia contrasts with the picturesque
frankness of his compatriot Vambéry. Of this period of his life he merely says: ‘I became acquainted with
many literary treasures, shut up in 320 printed volumes which are the basis of all Tibetan learning and
religion.’ In November 1824 he descended the Sutlej gorge, emerging from the Himalayas at the British
hill-cantonment of Sabathu, with an epitome of the 320 volumes and the beginnings of a Tibetan
dictionary in his bundle.
The apparition of a European, known to the natives as Sikandar Beg and clad in a blanket, issuing forth
from the Himalayas, was without precedent in the respectable routine of our frontier station. The officer
in charge hospitably detained the pilgrim, and put on him English clothes, but at the same time wrote for
orders regarding his disposal. The Governor-General briefly commanded that the stranger should give an
account of himself. This Csoma did, in two letters of a simplicity so touching, and with a singleness of
purpose so manifest, as to establish himself once and for ever in the confidence of the Indian Government.
He only desired to continue his studies, and if the British nation would be pleased to help him, all the
results should belong to it. Lord Amherst accepted the proposal, granted an allowance of fifty rupees a
month to the scholar, and had him furnished with letters to the Chiefs on the Tibetan Frontier. Before
setting out again, Csoma put on record in May 1825 precisely what he undertook to do. Until he could
fulfil his obligations to the Indian Government, he silently gave up his search for the origin of his nation
in Mongolia. He agreed to return to Tibet, and to remain there till he had collected the materials for three
great works. First, a Tibetan grammar; second, a Tibetan-English dictionary of over 30,000 words; third,
an account of Tibetan literature, with specimens of its books, and a succinct history of the country. When
he should have gathered his materials in Tibet, he prayed that the Governor-General would permit him to
journey to Calcutta, to submit the results to the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Henceforward this became the practical programme of Csoma’s life. He never, indeed, abandoned the
hope of resuming his search for the Mongolian starting-point of his race. That was to be his crowning
achievement. But he never permitted this dream to interfere with the work which he had taken public
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