An End to Suffering Page 7

  Jacquemont was not impressed. ‘Have not the absurd at Benares and those in Germany a family likeness?’ he asked. ‘We adopt in Europe,’ he wrote to a friend in Paris,

  a completely false notion of the real intellectual habits of the Indian nations. We generally suppose them inclined to an ascetic and contemplative life; and upon the faith of Pythagoras, we continue to look upon them as extremely occupied with the metamorphosis of their souls after death. I assure you, sir, that the metempsychosis is the last of their cares; they plough, sow, and water their fields, reap and recommence the same round of labours; they work, eat, smoke, and sleep without having either the wish or the leisure to attend to such idle nonsense, which would only make them more wretched, and the very name of which is unknown to the greater number of them.21

  This was the blunt commonsensical appraisal of the traveller who felt he couldn’t be fooled. Jacquemont was at least partly right. Whether or not they worried about salvation in this or the next world, most Indians then knew nothing or very little of the hymns, invocations and liturgical formulae of the four Vedas or the philosophical idealism of the Upanishads that people in Europe took to be the very essence of Indian civilization. These texts had long been monopolized by an elite minority of Brahmins who zealously guarded their knowledge of Sanskrit. Some of these Brahmins educated the British amateur scholars, who earnestly studied the canon of what they supposed to be ancient Indian tradition and managed to remain mostly unaware of the more numerous non-textual, syncretic religious and philosophical traditions of India – for example, the popular devotional cults, Sufi shrines, festivals, rites and legends that varied across India and formed the world view of a majority of Indians.

  Jacquemont claimed to have a better idea of what actual knowledge consisted of. It certainly did not lie in the distant past, or in the kind of abstract speculation ancient Indians had indulged in. It consisted of facts verifiable by observation and experiment: of science.

  ‘My father,’ Jacquemont wrote towards the end of his visit, ‘will perhaps be somewhat displeased with my not bringing him back some very profound system of Indian metaphysics, but I have at present upon the Ganges a boat which descends from Delhi to Calcutta, laden with things much more real than the real essences: they are the archives of the physical and natural history of the countries I have hitherto visited.’22

  Jacquemont never lost his exalted sense of himself and the new Europe he represented. In March 1832, he was on his way to Bombay. From there he hoped to catch a ship to France, when he ran into Governor-General Bentinck and his wife. Though they met deep in the desert of Rajasthan, they were attended by ‘all the luxuries and refinements of Europe’. Jacquemont and Bentinck dined together and talked of England and its ‘probable destinies’. They talked also of Europe, and concluded by exclaiming, as Jacquemont reported,

  how strange was our meeting there, and talking there of such things. He, a man from England, one of the crowd there; here the absolute ruler of Asia: I, quietly engaged in my philosophical researches amidst barbarous tribes. We smiled at the idea of deeply-laid combinations to bring in such extraordinary circumstances, which have arisen chiefly from chance and necessity. How little understood is this political phenomenon in Europe.23

  His most extraordinary encounter in India occurred in a village called Kanum, close to Kinnaur’s border with Tibet, not long after he left Captain Kennedy’s luxurious resort in Simla in order to spend a few months in the inner Himalayas. He knew partly what to expect as he crossed the Sutlej river into the Buddhist parts of Kinnaur. ‘At Kanum,’ he wrote to his father, ‘I shall soon see that incredible Hungarian original, M. Alexander de Körös, of whom you have no doubt heard: he has been living for four years under the very modest name of Secunder Beg, that is to say, Alexander the Great, dressed in the Oriental style.’

  Captain Kennedy had already warned Jacquemont about the Hungarian eccentric who had allegedly walked on foot from Europe to India. De Körös had shown up in Simla three years previously, dressed in rags and looking like a Russian spy. Kennedy had had to detain him until he could check his credentials with his bosses in Calcutta. De Körös spent a few resentful months among the bohemian bachelors of Simla before he was finally allowed to leave.

  In Simla, he stayed with James Gerard, a British army doctor, who later met de Körös in the village of Kanum and reported that he was studying Tibetan texts, living ‘like the sages of antiquity, and taking no interest in any object around him except his literary avocations’, and ‘highly pleased with the prospects of unfolding to the world those vast mines of literary riches’. Such austerity did not impress Jacquemont whose attitude towards de Körös reflected the refined Parisian’s disdain for the rustic East European. But de Körös’s obsessions belonged as much to the Europe of his time as Jacquemont’s did.

  He was born in 1784 in a small village at the foot of the Hungarian Carpathians, a cold windswept place, probably not very different from the villages of the inner Himalayas where he spent much of his later life. Legend traced his ancestors, the Szekeleys, to the Huns, the still obscure nomadic people who invaded Europe in the fourth century AD. But de Körös’s Hungary was subject to the Habsburg empire and its educated classes were only beginning to feel, around the time of de Körös’s birth, the rebellious nationalism that had already fired the French and American revolutions and was about to remake Europe as a whole. By the time de Körös began his education, Hungarian culture and language, both conspicuously different from the European cultures around them, were attracting a new kind of attention from the Hungarian elite. The question – who are the Hungarians? – was now urgent.

  The Hungarians who wished to separate themselves from imperial Austria and claim a unique identity for themselves preferred to think that their ancestors had come from somewhere in Central Asia. The notion that Hungarians were proud horsemen of the Central Asian steppes agreed with de Körös’s own cherished sense of being linked to Attila the Hun, whose raiding armies seriously damaged the already frail Roman Empire by the fifth century.

  As an ascetic young scholar, de Körös vowed to dedicate his life to discovering ‘the obscure origins of our homeland’. At university in Göttingen, the Orientalist scholar Johann Eichhorn encouraged him to study the Central Asian peoples. He picked up several languages at Göttingen – he was to know seventeen altogether – and became even more determined to travel to Central Asia and find the intellectual glue for Hungarian patriotism.

  When he finally set out for Asia in late 1819, at the age of thirty-three, he aimed wide. His final destination was what we now know as the Central Asian Republics and westernmost China. He intended to travel first to the Ottoman capital Constantinople and study the texts of medieval Arab geographers there. But the news of an epidemic in the city made him travel instead to Alexandria, from where he moved, in slow stages, to Aleppo in modern-day Syria.

  At Aleppo he changed into Asiatic dress, invented a new name for himself – Secunder Beg, the Persian version of Alexander the Great – described himself as an Armenian and joined a caravan moving towards Baghdad. In the autumn of 1820, he reached Tehran, where he spent a few months learning Persian and convincing himself through his study of Arabic texts that his ancestral homeland was to be found in either Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan, or Yarkand in the Tarim Basin, an area just north of the Tibetan plateau and now part of the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

  But his travels were repeatedly thwarted by rumours of Russian armies, which were then rapidly advancing across Central Asia. In 1822, he was in Kashmir, failing to persuade anyone to take him through Tibet to Yarkand, when he met William Moorcroft, in another of the auspicious encounters of nineteenth-century India.

  Moorcroft was the first qualified veterinarian in England. A disastrous financial speculation had forced him to India, where he managed the East India Company’s stud farm, and later became the first great explorer of the western Himalayan ranges. At the time he met de Körös, he h
ad spent two years shuttling between the valley of Kashmir and the northern plateau of Ladakh, trying to get to Yarkand and Bukhara. He claimed that he was concerned about the declining quality of horses in India and wanted to find a superior breed in Central Asia, of the kind he thought Attila the Hun and his army might have used. Like de Körös, he was thwarted by the Chinese ban on western travellers in Tibet. But the Kashmiri traders probably had their own reasons for refusing to help him. For Moorcroft was an intriguer, an early player of what came to be known as the ‘Great Game’ of Central Asia, involving the ambitions of the British, the Ottoman and the Russian empires.

  He was obsessed with the Russian Empire, particularly the possibility that Russian ambitions in the region would undermine British power. He suspected that the Sikh Maharajah of Punjab, Ranjit Singh, who then controlled Kashmir, was conspiring with the Russians against the British. He later tried on his own initiative and failed to get Ladakh to pay tribute to the British rather than to Ranjit Singh. The effort earned him a reprimand from his British superiors who did not wish to annoy the Sikh Maharajah.

  But Moorcroft persisted. He immediately saw opportunities in the raggedly dressed Hungarian who claimed to be an Armenian. He invited de Körös to join his entourage. They travelled together for nearly eight months, spending time in both Kashmir and Ladakh. Early in their acquaintance, Moorcroft gave de Körös his copy of a book on Tibet, the Alphabetum Tibetanum, which was then the only book in a European language on Tibet. A collection of facts and fables, based on missionary records, it had been published by a Catholic priest in Rome in 1762. Most of it was a hit-and-miss affair: among other significant errors, it identified the religion of Tibet as Manicheism, the long-forgotten religion of pre-Islamic Persia that was supposedly influenced by Buddhism.

  De Körös studied Alphabetum Tibetanum during his months in Kashmir, between picking up basic Tibetan from a Persian-speaking Ladakhi, and translating letters in Russian that Moorcroft managed to intercept. Moorcroft encouraged de Körös to abandon his idea of travelling to Central Asia and instead to add to his scholarly skills by learning Tibetan in the Indian Himalayan country adjoining Tibet. He told de Körös of the immense favour he could do for Europe by compiling the first accurate dictionary and grammar of the Tibetan language.

  Moorcroft doubtless wished to flatter de Körös. But he probably also realized that the British needed more than a cursory knowledge of Tibetan as a first step towards preventing the country from falling into Russian hands. He gave de Körös money to carry out his research, wrote him introductions to Ladakhi and British officials, and also appealed for financial assistance to the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

  Moorcroft was so persuasive that de Körös even managed to convince himself that Tibetan texts might contain something about the origins of the Hungarian peoples. In May 1823, de Körös left Srinagar for Leh, from where he travelled on foot for nine days to a monastery in Zanskar, the most remote part of Ladakh, where the cold kept villagers indoors for much of the year. Here, in an unheated cell, de Körös spent sixteen months with the local lama, Phuntsog, a learned authority on Tibetan Buddhism. Sitting huddled together under sheepskin cloaks, de Körös and Phuntsog took turns uncovering their hands to turn the pages of the Tibetan manuscripts.24

  De Körös probably didn’t know that he was only beginning to read the greatest collection of Buddhist literature, comprising around a hundred volumes, most of which were translations from the Sanskrit of texts that had been lost in India itself. Buddhism had reached Tibet from India only in the seventh century, long after its arrival in East Asia. From the beginning, it had taken a distinctive form, influenced by the form of Buddhism called Vajrayana (diamond vehicle), which arose in India about the time it was adopted by many of the Indian monks who brought Buddhism to Tibet.

  It dealt in magic, symbolism, esoteric ritual, and even used sexual desire as a means to enlightenment. It considered crucial the role of the guru, or teacher, in spiritual practice, and did not much exalt the bhikshu (monk) over the upasak (layman). Tibetans revered many different types of Buddhas and images of such Bodhisattvas as Manjusri and Avalokiteshvara. They deployed mandalas and mantras as aid to meditation. It was this form of Buddhism which later made Tibet appear the land of magic and mystery to foreign visitors.

  In October 1824, de Körös decided he couldn’t endure another winter in Zanskar and left for the Kulu valley in the south, hoping that Phuntsog would join him there to continue his education. But the lama never showed up. The snow closed the passes from Zanskar; and de Körös, now at a loose end, found himself travelling to the British outpost at Simla, where he expected to make use of Moorcroft’s introductions.

  It was in this way that Jacquemont’s host in Simla, Captain Kennedy, received the strange solitary traveller from Hungary one day in late 1824. De Körös expected to be welcomed as a prodigal scholar from Europe, working to advance the knowledge of barbarous tribes; he wished to be acknowledged in the role Moorcroft had created for him. He had little idea of how implausible his story seemed to the British: the Hungarian scholar seeking his national origins in Central Asia and hoping to learn Tibetan, a language few outsiders had heard of. Also, Moorcroft by then had been away from India for years and his sponsorship of de Körös looked to the British as ill-considered as his anti-Russian intrigues in Ladakh. Kennedy released de Körös from informal house arrest only after five months, the time it took him to establish the Hungarian’s credentials in distant Calcutta.

  By then de Körös was tired of the high-spirited bachelors of Simla and eager to get back to his studies in Tibetan language and literature. He set off for Ladakh again, this time armed with a small stipend from the Royal Asiatic Society. But he floundered for the next year, first failing to meet Phuntsog, and then finding him less than cooperative. In the meantime, the British in Calcutta heard of the publication of a Tibetan dictionary compiled by a Baptist missionary, decided that de Körös’s labours had been pre-empted and cancelled his stipend. De Körös, back in Simla, protested that the dictionary was worthless and that his efforts were still needed. Other scholars in Calcutta unexpectedly proved him right, and in 1827 the British resumed de Körös’s stipend.

  In 1825, de Körös had visited Kanum, a village on the river Sutlej close to the border with Tibet, with a view to learning Tibetan there. The local monastery called Kangyur, which had been established in the eleventh century, had plenty of manuscripts, but de Körös found the lamas disappointingly Hindu in their outlook, and with little knowledge of Tibetan. Nevertheless, he returned to Kanum in 1827 after regaining his stipend, and spent the next three years there. This time Phuntsog was with him, and the working conditions were better than what he had endured in Zanskar. He had his own cottage. The landscape was less harsh, even tinged with the green of pine forests and apricot trees.

  One afternoon in the autumn of 1993, I walked up to Kanum. From the banks of the fast-flowing river, the grey mud houses on the hill appeared to be collapsing upon each other. From up close, the cluster of low-roofed buildings with tiny windows spoke of strong winds. Children with cold red faces peered from apparently bare rooms. The monastery with the pagoda-shaped roof smelled of rancid butter, and the Tibetan refugees there appeared strangely merry in sunglasses.

  It was here that Jacquemont met de Körös in the summer of 1830. He knew of de Körös’s prickliness from Captain Kennedy and others at Simla. Accordingly, he first wrote to de Körös, informing him of his arrival and requesting a meeting. De Körös, who was probably lonely, appeared almost instantly at his camp, looking, Jacquemont reported, like a ‘Tartar shepherd’. Moreover, he revealed an eccentricity that he had developed in his great solitude by refusing to sit down in Jacquemont’s presence. He didn’t think, he said, that he was the Frenchman’s equal. Jacquemont failed to assure him to the contrary. The next day, Jacquemont visited de Körös at his cottage and found him transcribing Tibetan on a low wooden desk, surrounded by books and papers. De K
örös once again insisted on standing up. Jacquemont, who was much taller than de Körös, had to bow his head in order to avoid bumping it against the low ceiling of the cottage. He finally gave up and sat down even as the Hungarian remained standing before him.

  Later, de Körös showed him round the monastery, whose manuscripts were part of the large Tibetan Buddhist canon. Jacquemont reported scornfully on their contents. ‘It’s enough to put you to sleep standing up,’ he wrote to his father. ‘There are about 20 chapters on the kind of shoes that lamas should wear…learned dissertations on the properties of the flesh of gryphons, dragons, unicorns, and on the admirable virtues of the horn of the winged horse.’

  But de Körös’s nine years of monastic seclusion in the Himalayas weren’t entirely fruitless. The Buddha’s connection with India was not to be established definitively for several years, but de Körös was able to prove that Tibetan Buddhism, like all other Buddhisms in the world, had originated in India and that much of the Tibetan canon, called Kangyur, consisted of translations from Sanskrit texts. This was a considerable achievement when Tibet was as much a mystery as the Buddha.

  Two years after meeting de Körös, Jacquemont travelled to Bombay in order to board a ship to France. He chose to walk across the Indian plains he had often described as melancholy and desolate. It was high summer, a time of disease, and at some point Jacquemont caught a fever. Later, he developed an abscess on his liver. He couldn’t sleep for days on end. While trying to recuperate in the western Indian city of Pune, he wrote that ‘a traveller in my line has several ways of making what the Italians terms a fiasco, but the most complete fiasco of all is to die on the road’.

  Jacquemont knew then that he would not see France again. But it was unlike him to mourn or panic. His last letters are full of graceful farewells. He tried to assure his family that he was being looked after by considerate Englishmen. ‘The cruellest pang,’ he wrote in his final letter to his brother, ‘for those we love, is, that when dying in a far distant land, they imagine that in the last hours of our existence we are deserted and unnoticed.’