“As regards Csoma de Körös, I never think of him without interest and gratitude. I had heard of him, and seen his Tibetan Grammar and Dictionary before leaving England. And one thing that used to make me think a five months’ voyage interminable was my longing to become acquainted with one who had prepared the way for the acquisition of a language of Asia, thought until then almost mythical. For neither Father Georgi’s nor Abel Rémusat’s treatises went very far to clear the mystery.
“One of my early visits, then, was to the Asiatic Society’s house [in Calcutta], where Csoma lived as under-librarian.[17] I found him a man of middle stature, of somewhat strange expression and features, much weather-beaten from his travels, but kind, amiable, and willing to impart all he knew. He was, however, very shy, and extremely disinterested. Although I had to cross the river to come to him, I requested him at once to give me one lesson a week in Tibetan, and he agreed to do so most readily. But I could not make him consent to take any money. He told me to come as often as I liked, on the condition that his teaching was to be free, for the pleasure and love of it. Of course this prevented me from visiting him as frequently as I should otherwise have done, yet I went to him for a lesson as often as I dared to do so. Although I frequently asked him to come and stay in my house for change of air, I never could prevail upon him to come, owing to his shyness and retiring habits. But as I happened to be the only person who was troubling himself about Tibetan, he and I became very good friends during the whole of my (alas! too short) stay in India. And [[xviii]]when we parted he gave me the whole of his Tibetan books, some thirty volumes. I value such relics highly, and still use the same volume, containing his Grammar and Dictionary, which I used to turn over with him.”
Speaking of Csoma Körösi’s literary life at Calcutta, M. Pavie says, in the article which has already been cited, “These labours occupied his time for the space of nine years. He had turned his study into a sort of cell, from which he scarcely ever emerged, except to walk up and down the long neighbouring galleries. It was there that, during our stay in Bengal, we very frequently saw him, absorbed in a dreamy meditation, smiling at his own thoughts, as silent as the Brahmans who were copying Sanskrit texts. He had forgotten Europe to live amid the clouds of ancient Asia.”
Early in 1842 Csoma Körösi left Calcutta, with the intention of revisiting Tibet, and of making his way, if possible, to Lhasa, where he was in hopes of discovering rich stores of Tibetan literature as yet unknown to the learned world. On the 24th of March he arrived at Darjíling, in Nepal, where the superintendent of the station, Dr. Archibald Campbell, did all he could to further his views. But on the 6th of April he was attacked by fever, and on the 11th he died, a victim, as Professor Max Müller has said, “to his heroic devotion to the study of ancient languages and religions.” His wants, apart from literary requirements, appear to have been as few as those of any monk, whether Christian or Buddhistic. “His effects,” says Dr. Campbell, “consisted of four boxes of books and papers, the suit of blue clothes which he always wore, and in which he died, a few shirts, and one cooking-pot. His food was confined to tea, of which he was very fond, and plain boiled rice, of which he ate very little. On a mat on the floor, with a box of books on the four sides, he sat, ate, slept, and studied; never undressed at night, and rarely went out during the day. He never drank wine or spirits, or used tobacco or other stimulants.” [[xix]]
A few days before he died he gave Dr. Campbell “a rapid summary of the manner in which he believed his native land was possessed by the original ‘Huns,’ and his reasons for tracing them to Central or Eastern Asia.” Dr. Campbell gathered from his conversation that “all his hopes of attaining the object of the long and laborious search were centred in the discovery of the country of the ‘Yoogars.’ This land he believed to be to the east and north of Lassa and the province of Kham, and on the northern confines of China; to reach it was the goal of his most ardent wishes, and there he fully expected to find the tribes he had hitherto sought in vain.” On the way he hoped to make great literary discoveries, and he would dilate in the most enthusiastic manner “on the delight he expected to derive from coming in contact with some of the learned men of the East (Lassa), as the Lamas of Ladakh and Kānsun, with whom alone he had previous communion, were confessedly inferior in learning to those of Eastern Tibet.” He was generally reticent about the benefits which scholars might derive from his contemplated journey, but “What would Hodgson, Turnour, and some of the philosophers of Europe not give to be in my place when I get to Lassa!” was a frequent exclamation of his during his conversations with Dr. Campbell before his illness.
The Asiatic Society of Bengal at once placed a thousand rupees at the disposal of Dr. Campbell for the erection of a monument above the remains of the Hungarian pilgrim. And the Government of India has since given instructions that the grave of this genuine and disinterested scholar shall be for all time placed under the care of the British Resident at Darjíling.[18]
To the Hungarian enthusiast may be fairly applied, with a slight change, the words which Professor Max [[xx]]Müller[19] has written with reference to Hiouen-thsang, the Chinese pilgrim, who spent so much time “quietly pursuing among strangers, within the bleak walls of the cell of a Buddhist college, the study of a foreign language,” that there was “something in his life and the work of his life that places him by right among the heroes of Greece, the martyrs of Rome, the knights of the Crusades, the explorers of the Arctic regions; something that makes it a duty to inscribe his name on the roll of the worthies of the human race.”
Although the language and literature of Tibet occupied so much of Csoma Körösi’s time and thoughts, yet the main object of his life was to work out the mysterious problem as to the origin of the Hungarian nation. According to M. Jules Mohl, it was a remark of Blumenbach’s about the possibility of discovering in Asia the original home of the prehistoric ancestors of the Magyars, which first turned the attention to the subject of the young Hungarian, who was then studying medicine at Göttingen. According to Hunfalvy,[20] his fancy may have been fired by De Guignes’s opinion, published a little before 1815, that the Huns had wandered from the western borders of the Chinese empire, first to the neighbourhood of the Volga, and then on to Pannonia. But the fact of Csoma Körösi being a Szekler by birth, says Hunfalvy, is regarded as one of the reasons for his looking for the origin of his nation and language in the seat of the ancient Huns. For the Hungarian chronicles had for centuries nourished in the Szeklers the belief that they were the direct descendants of the Huns of Attila. In a letter which he wrote home during his stay in Teheran, dated the 21st of December 1820, he said:—“Both to satisfy [[xxi]]my own desire, and to prove my gratitude and love to my nation, I have set off, and must search for the origin of my nation according to the lights which I have kindled in Germany, avoiding neither dangers that may perhaps occur, nor the distance I may have to travel. Heaven has favoured my course, and if some great misfortune does not happen to me, I shall within a short time be able to prove that my conviction was founded upon no false basis.” During his stay in Calcutta, between his expeditions, he experienced “the bitterest moments of his life,” being conscious that up to that time he had fruitlessly looked for the origin of the Hungarians. It was that feeling, says Hunfalvy, which drove him forth upon the pilgrimage which proved fatal to him. “According to his conviction, the country inhabited by the Dsugur or Dzungar race, dwelling to the north-east of Lhassa, on the western frontier of China, was the goal which he had been seeking all his life, the region in which he might hope at length to discover the Asiatic descendants of the ancestors of his Hungarian forefathers.” The foundation of his hopes, as expressed a few days before his death to Dr. Campbell, was as follows:—“In the dialects of Europe, the Sclavonic, Celtic, Saxon, and German, I believe, the people who gave their name to the country now called Hungary were styled Hunger or Ungur, Oongar or Yoongar; and in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian works there are notices of a nation in Central Asia resembling in many respects the people who came from the East into Hungary. In these languages they are styled Oogur, Woogur, Voogur, or Yoogur, according to the pronunciation of the Persian letters; and from the same works it might be inferred, he said, that the country of the Yoogurs was situated as above noted.” His views, however, on this subject are not accepted by his countrymen. His opinion “was based upon a false foundation,” says Hunfalvy, and consequently his labours in that particular field have remained without result. But as a scholar in [[xxii]]general, as a specialist in everything which concerns Tibet, and as a single-minded, self-sacrificing student, he is held in high honour in his native land, as may be learnt from the oration which was delivered in his honour at Pest on the 8th of October 1843 by Baron Joseph Eötvos, who was at one time the Minister of Public Instruction for Hungary.
On this subject I have been favoured with a letter (in English) from the Hungarian linguist and explorer Professor Arminius Vámbéry. In it, after stating that scarcely anything is known in Hungary about the early years of Csoma Körösi, he proceeds to say:—“We only know that it was the study of Oriental languages in Germany which gave him the idea of the possibility of finding a people in Asia speaking our language, and closely connected with us. This, of course, was a mistake, for Hungarian, a mixed tongue consisting of an Ugrian and a Turko-Tatar dialect, has undergone two genetic periods—one in the ancient seat between the Urals and the Volga, and another after the settlement on Pannonia, where also large Slavonic elements inserted themselves. It was thus a sheer impossibility to discover in Asia a language similar to ours, although a considerable amount of affinity can be proved, partly in the Ugrian branch (the Ostyak and the Vogul), partly in the Eastern Turkish, unadulterated by Persian and Arab influence.
“This knowledge, however, is the result of recent investigations, and poor Körösi could have had hardly any notion of it. His unbounded love for science and for his nation drove him to the East without a penny in his pocket, and most curious is the account I heard from an old Hungarian, Count Teleky, regarding the outset of Körösi’s travels. The Count was standing before the gate of his house in a village in Transylvania, when he saw Körösi passing by, clad in a thin yellow nankin dress, with a stick in his hand and a small bundle.