Fraternity-Testvériség, 1960 (38. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1960-02-01 / 2. szám

FRATERNITY

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by the Hungarian Government, in recognition of his services to science, for the purchase of books for Indian libraries.

In 1837, he became the Society’s Librarian and published countless

articles and books on the Tibetan Buddhist scriptures and language.

Yet the restless spirit which once prompted him to leave home and country to scour the wilderness in search of the unknown origins of the Magyar race, made him quit his pleasant surroundings in spite of

his colleagues’ entreaties, and the lama-scholar once more and for the last time took to the jungle roads with Lhasa as his destination.

For it was in Lhasa that he hoped to discover, in the Dalai Lama’s vast library, the missing clue which would link the Magyars to their

forgotten past.

Yet destiny was not to satisfy his desire and, stricken with malaria in the Terai, his battered constitution collapsed after reaching Darjeeling. He passed away on April 11, 1842, at the age of 58.

By some freak, or probably because none was apprised of the fact

that he was a Buddhist, his body was buried in Darjeeling’s Anglican cemetery.

The Asiatic Society of Bengal erected a bust of Csorna on their premises in Calcutta and a chorten-like structure over his grave, with a tablet commemorating his exemplary life of patient labor and “long years of privations such as have been seldom endured” and commending “his works as his best and real monument”. To this the Hungarian Society of Science added two more tablets in Hungarian in 1910.

It is a pity that both his memorials, the one over his grave no less than his priceless works, then published by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, are alike in need of attention — the former, by way of repairs, and the latter, of revival, since all the author’s books are since long out of print.

It should be mentioned here that the world’s philologists and scholars of Tibetan lore, along with Buddhist monks, are not alone in wishing to revive Csoma’s memory. Hungarians in exile, who have sent a large share of their first income abroad towards our Tibetan refugee camps, are also evincing keen interest in their countryman who so foreshadowed the ties between Hungary and Tibet that he earned alike the gratitude of science and the praises of the saintly.

“SISTER SAVITRI” (Máday Éva)

In The Encyclopedia Britannica (1955 ed.) we read: “Dezső Szabó’s “The Devastated Village” was the literary event of the revolutionary year 1918-19 ... It is the key novel of the Nyugat-West generation, with a disguised genius-poet as its hero. At times malicious and bitter, it is the work of a superior talent and of a fine stylist . . . His critical work was very important, though his scholarly aestetics were less appreciated by the public than his temperamental outbursts; he was too personal and independent to keep in favour with any regime.”