I had always been curious about Buddhism, although, as a committed atheist, I was suspicious of anything religious. And turning 50 and becoming bisexual and Buddhist did seem far too predictable—a sort of Berkeley bat mitzvah, a standard rite of passage for aging Jewish academic women in Northern California. But still, I began to read Buddhist philosophy.In 1734, in scotland, a 23-year-old was falling apart.As a teenager, he’d thought he had glimpsed a new way of thinking and living, and ever since, he’d been trying to work it out and convey it to others in a great book. The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today, with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was suffering from anxiety and depression. The young man’s name was David Hume. Somehow, during the next three years, he managed not only to recover but also, remarkably, to write his book. Even more remarkably, it turned out to be one of the greatest books in the history of philosophy: A Treatise of Human Nature.
In his Treatise, Hume rejected the traditional religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Instead, he took Newton as a model and announced a new science of the mind, based on observation and experiment. That new science led him to radical new conclusions. He argued that there was no soul, no coherent self, no “I.” “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he wrote in the Treatise, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day?
Until Hume, philosophers had searched for metaphysical foundations supporting our ordinary experience, an omnipotent God or a transcendent reality outside our minds. But Hume undermined all that. When you really look hard at everything we think we know, he argued, the foundations crumble. Descartes at least had said you always know that you yourself exist (“I think, therefore I am”), but Hume rejected even that premise.How did Hume come up with these ideas, so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day? What turned the neurotic Presbyterian teenager into the great founder of the European Enlightenment?In my shabby room, as I read Buddhist philosophy, I began to notice something that others had noticed before me. Some of the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in Hume’s Treatise. But this was crazy. Surely in the 1730s, few people in Europe knew about Buddhist philosophy.
Still, as I read, I kept finding parallels. The Buddha doubted the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. In his doctrine of “emptiness,” he suggested that we have no real evidence for the existence of the outside world. He said that our sense of self is an illusion, too. The Buddhist sage Nagasena elaborated on this idea. The self, he said, is like a chariot. A chariot has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of wheels and frame and handle. Similarly, the self has no transcendent essence; it’s just a collection of perceptions and emotions.“I never can catch myself at any time ithout a perception.”That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.
Or could he have?
I discovered that at least one person in Europe in the 1730s not only knew about Buddhism but had studied Buddhist philosophy for years. His name was Ippolito Desideri, and he had been a Jesuit missionary in Tibet. In 1728, just before Hume began the Treatise, Desideri finished his book, the most complete and accurate European account of Buddhist philosophy to be written until the 20th century. The catch was that it wasn’t published. No Catholic missionary could publish anything without the approval of the Vatican—and officials there had declared that Desideri’s book could not be printed. The manuscript disappeared into the Church’s archives.I consulted Ernest Mossner’s classic biography of Hume. When Hume wrote the Treatise, he was living in a little French town called La Flèche, 160 miles southwest of Paris. Mossner said Hume went to La Flèche to “rusticate,” probably because it was cheap. But he also mentioned that La Flèche was home to the Jesuit Royal College.
When I searched the library databases at Berkeley, I found hundreds of books and thousands of articles I could read about David Hume, but only two about Ippolito Desideri: one article and a drastically abridged 1932 English translation of his manuscript. The article had appeared in Indica, an obscure journal published in Bombay, in 1986. I had to get it shipped down from the regional storage facility, where millions of books and articles in Berkeley’s collection languish unread.
It mostly recapitulated what I had read before. But the author, an Italian named Luciano Petech, mentioned that he had edited a 1952 collection of missionary documents, I Missionari Italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, and that it included some Desideri manuscripts. And, in passing, he provided me with an interesting new detail. “In January 1727,” Petech wrote, “he left India, once more on a French ship, and arrived in Paris.”Desideri had come back to Rome through France—one more intriguing coincidence.The abridged Desideri translation could be read only in the Rare Book Room, so I headed there the next day. It was a beautiful book with red capital letters and romantic tipped-in photographs of majestic Buddhas and tranquil Himalayan valleys. I began to read eagerly.
It’s a remarkable story. In his 20s, Desideri conceived his own grand project—to convert the Indies to Catholicism—and in 1716 he became one of the first Europeans to go to Lhasa, and the first to stay. He was passionate, emotional, and easily exasperated. He was also curious, brave, and unbelievably tenacious. Desideri sailed from Rome to India in 1712. In 1714 he began walking from Delhi across the Himalayas to Lhasa—a trek that lasted 18 months. He slept on the ground, in the snow, and struggled with snow blindness and frostbite. At one point he made his way over a rushing river by clinging precariously to a bridge made of two vine ropes. To get through the Ladakh desert, he joined the caravan of a Tartar princess and argued about theology with her each night in her tent.
When he finally arrived in Lhasa, the king and the lamas welcomed him enthusiastically, and their enthusiasm didn’t wane when he announced that he was a lama himself and intended to convert them all to Catholicism. In that case, the king suggested, it would be a good idea for him to study Buddhism. If he really understood Buddhism and he could still convince the Tibetans that Catholicism was better, then of course they would convert.Desideri accepted the challenge. He spent the next five years in the Buddhist monasteries tucked away in the mountains around Lhasa. The monasteries were among the largest academic institutions in the world at the time. Desideri embarked on their 12-year-long curriculum in theology and philosophy. He composed a series of Christian tracts in Tibetan verse, which he presented to the king. They were beautifully written on the scrolls used by the great Tibetan libraries, with elegant lettering and carved wooden cases. He worked on his Christian tracts and mastered the basic texts of Buddhism. He also translated the work of the great Buddhist philosopher Tsongkhapa into Italian.In his book, Desideri describes Tibetan Buddhism in great and accurate detail, especially in one volume titled “Of the False and Peculiar Religion Observed in Tibet.” He explains emptiness, karma, reincarnation, and meditation, and he talks about the Buddhist denial of the self.He spent the next 11 years writing and rewriting his book and appealing desperately to the Vatican to let him return to Tibet. It had clearly become the only place where he really felt that he was himself. In 1732 the authorities finally ruled—in favor of the Capuchins. His book would not be published and he could never return. He died four months later.Almost at the end of Desideri’s book, I came across a sentence that brought me up short. “I passed through La Flèche,” he wrote, “and on September the fourth arrived in the city of Le Mans.”La Flèche? Where Hume had lived? I let out an astonished cry. The librarians, accustomed to Rare Book Room epiphanies, smiled instead of shushing me.So Desideri not only had been to La Flèche but had also talked with the Jesuits at the Royal College at some length. Reading Petech with Blake,idence suggests that he had this manuscript with him as he made his way from France to Rome in 1727. When he got back to Rome, he revised his text considerably, and six months later he produced a new manuscript. In this version, Desideri writes, “When I returned through France and Italy to Tuscany and Rome, I was strongly urged by many men of letters, by gentlemen and by important personages, to write down in proper order all I had told them at different times.” The reason? The religion of Tibet was “so entirely different from any other,” he wrote, that it “deserves to be known in order to be contested.”So it was possible that Desideri had sent the Royal College at La Flèche a copy of this revised manuscript; the Jesuits regularly circulated such unpublished reports among themselves.
A later letter shows that Hume talked with at least one of those Jesuits at some length. He recalls walking in the cloister of the Royal College, his head “full of the topics of my Treatise,” with a Jesuit “of some parts and learning.” The Jesuit was describing a miracle, and this inspired Hume to come up with one of his cleverest skeptical arguments. Who was this Jesuit “of some parts and learning?” Could he have been one of the fathers who had met Desideri eight years earlier? And whoever he was, what else did he and Hume talk about?The Jesuits in the 1687 embassy, including Dolu, stayed in Siam for a year and spent a great deal of time with the talapoins—the European word for the Siamese Buddhist monks. Three of them even lived in the Buddhist monastery and followed its rules.In 1723, after his extraordinarily eventful and exotic career, Dolu retired to peaceful La Flèche for the rest of his long life. He was 80 when Hume arrived, the last surviving member of the embassies, and a relic of the great age of Jesuit science.
. One of the footnotes in the Spinoza entry was about “oriental philosophers” who, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God and argued for “emptiness.” And it cross-referenced another entry about the monks of Siam, as described by the Jesuit ambassadors. Hume must have been reading about Buddhism, and Dolu’s journey, in the very building where Dolu lived.I’d learned that Hume could indeed have known about Buddhist philosophy. In fact, he had written the Treatise in one of the few places in Europe where that knowledge was available. Dolu himself had had firsthand experience of Siamese Buddhism, and had talked at some length with Desideri, who knew about Tibetan Buddhism. It’s even possible that the Jesuits at the Royal College had a copy of Desideri’s manuscript.
On Maggi. As a student a long time ago, a story conveyed to me. A young girl from Japan on her first visit to the US exclaimed "Dad, they have McDonald's here too". The girl who had not stepped out of Japan, thought McDonalds are an invention of Japan. Similarly, My American children think Maggi is Indian! Strange ways does universalism works with the power to make local what was or is foreign.