Sándor Kőrösi Csoma

Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, known in English as Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, was born in 1784 in the Székely village of Kőrös in Transylvania, then a grand principality of the Habsburg Empire and today Chiuruș in Romania. He belonged to a modest Székely Hungarian family; his father, András Csoma, served as a border guard. Raised in the Reformed Calvinist tradition common among the Székelys, he was educated at the Reformed College of Nagyenyed (now Aiud), where he excelled in classical languages and formed a lasting interest in the origins of the Hungarian people. In the later 1810s he studied at the University of Göttingen, following lectures in Oriental languages, history, and geography. There he absorbed the then-current scholarly idea that the Magyars had come from Inner or Central Asia, and he determined to go east in search of linguistic or documentary traces of that homeland.

In 1819 he left Transylvania and traveled overland through the Balkans, the Levant, Egypt, and Persia, often on foot and in extreme poverty. By the early 1820s he had reached the northwestern Indian subcontinent. In the Punjab and Kashmir he met the British explorer William Moorcroft, who suggested that Tibetan literature might illuminate Inner Asian history and urged him to learn Tibetan. Csoma proceeded to Ladakh and Zanskar. From the mid-1820s he lived for long periods in Buddhist monasteries, especially at Zangla and later at Kanum in the Sutlej valley, studying under Tibetan lamas, among them Sangye Puntsog. In austere conditions he mastered classical Tibetan and worked through large parts of the Buddhist canon, while still hoping the texts might bear on Magyar origins.

Those years produced the first substantial Tibetan-English dictionary and a grammar of Tibetan, both issued in Calcutta in 1834 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The publications made Csoma the founder of modern Tibetology in Europe. He also wrote analyses of the Kangyur and other notices on Tibetan Buddhist literature for the Society’s journal. From 1831 he lived mainly in Calcutta as librarian of the Asiatic Society and continued his philological work. He never gave up the search for a Magyar cradle-land. Later linguistics showed that Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family, not to Tibetan or Turkic stocks, but his Tibetan scholarship kept its scientific value apart from that hypothesis. He remained unmarried and childless; his life was that of a wandering, celibate scholar, not a Christian monk or member of a religious order, though he spent years as a student in Buddhist monastic houses.

In 1842 he left Calcutta intending to reach Lhasa and consult Tibetan historical sources in Tibet itself. He traveled toward Sikkim and the Himalayan foothills, contracted a fever generally identified as malaria, and died in Darjeeling in April 1842. He was buried in the Old Cemetery there; a tomb and a later Hungarian-sponsored monument mark the grave. He was never beatified or canonized in any Christian church. In 1933 Japanese Buddhists associated with Taisho University honored him as a bodhisattva for his service to Buddhist learning. In Hungary he is remembered as a national scholar and explorer, with statues, institutes, and the continuing use of his dictionary and grammar as foundational works that opened Tibetan studies to European scholarship.