The Hungarian orientalist who became a Buddhist saint in Japan – photos

Sándor Csoma Kőrösi was a Transylvanian Philologist and Orientalist who wrote the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book and was given the title of Bosatsu (Buddhist sainthood) by the Japanese in 1933. He searched for the origins of the Hungarians in the 1820s and 1830s and is considered to be the founder of Tibetology.

He wanted to know where Hungarians come from

He was born to a poor but noble Szekler family, and his father was a border guard. He started his studies in 1790, and in 1799, he moved to Nagyenyed (present-day Aiud, Romania) and

he did manual labour in exchange of which he received free education. 

He finished his studies in 1815 and received a scholarship to Göttingen where he began to learn English and studied Orientalistics under the supervision of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. By the time he arrived at the German university, he was already literate in 13 languages. After finishing his studies, he returned to Transylvania and started his journey towards discovering the Eastern roots of the Hungarians on November 24th, 1819.

His path was

full of dangers

those days, for example, he had to abandon Constantinople and Alexandria because of the black death epidemic. Furthermore, he mostly travelled on foot because he did not have money to pay for camels or horses. In Baghdad, he met a Slovak of Hungary, Anton Svoboda, who provided him with money and clothes and with whom he could speak Hungarian. In Tehran, he improved his English and Farsi language knowledge and took up the name Skander bey.

He finally reached Kashmir in 1822 where he met William Moorcroft, an English government official who encouraged him to study Tibetan language and literature.