Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, the Hungarian philologist who wrote the first Tibetan–English dictionary. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
It is the winter of 1827, high in the Zanskar range of the western Himalayas, and the temperature is below zero inside the building. Three men are shut in a single room nine feet square: a Buddhist lama, his attendant, and a European who has not been outside for months because the ground is under snow and the passes are closed. There is no fire and no lamp. The European sits wrapped in a sheepskin cloak with his arms folded across his chest, and he reads from morning until evening by the last of the daylight.
He is not resting between expeditions. He is working. By the time that winter ends, he will have collected and arranged tens of thousands of words of a language that no European had yet described in print — and he will have done it with no dictionary, no grammar, and no teacher in his own language, because none of those things existed yet. He was in the process of writing them.
His name was Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, and his story is the most extreme case in language history of a learner refusing to wait for better conditions.
A Poor Boy from a Village Nobody Had Heard Of
Csoma was born in Kőrös, a village in Transylvania — today Covasna, in Romania — into a poor Székely family. The date usually printed is 27 March 1784, though the 4 April often quoted is really his baptism day and some historians argue for 1787 or 1788. He was the sixth child of András Csoma, a border guard, and his wife Krisztina Getse.
His education began in the village school and nearly ended there. In 1799 he went to Nagyenyed (now Aiud) to join the Bethlen College, where poor students like him were admitted as gratistae — the fees waived in exchange for manual labor. He left in 1807, but he did not stop. He kept studying, took the public rigorosum in 1815, and won a scholarship that carried him to the University of Göttingen in Germany, where between 1816 and 1818 he threw himself into Oriental languages. Contemporary notes record him as literate in thirteen languages — Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German and Romanian alongside his native Hungarian — and he began learning English there too, under a professor named Fiorillo.
A Vow Made in a Classroom
Why would a poor student from Transylvania decide that his life's work was Tibetan? The answer starts with a student argument. History was a popular subject at the college, thanks to a professor named Ádám Herepei, and the debates that spilled out of his lectures were about the origin of the Hungarian people. The Székelys believed they descended from a branch of Attila's Huns who had settled in Transylvania in the fifth century, and the question of where the Magyars actually came from was wide open.
It is recorded that Csoma and two of his fellow students made a vow: they would one day travel to Asia and find traces of their nation's origin. Ten years later, at Göttingen, he was still animated by exactly that idea. There, under the Orientalist and historian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, the plan hardened into a method. Eichhorn told him about Arabic manuscripts that might hold information about the Hungarian nation while it was still in Asia, so Csoma began studying Arabic and decided he would not set out until he had read the relevant Arabic authors in Constantinople.
Notice the shape of the ambition. He did not want to learn a language so that he could read books. He wanted to read books that only existed in languages nobody near him spoke. The language came first, because nothing else was possible without it.
On Foot, Eastward
In 1819 he left Transylvania on foot. His first stop was Croatia to study Slavonic; a benefactor named Michael de Kenderessy gave him a hundred florins for the journey. Then he kept walking east, and he kept walking for the next three years.
The itinerary survives because Csoma reconstructed it himself in a letter introducing himself to a British officer, Captain Kennedy, who detained him as a suspected spy. From Bucharest he crossed the Danube, passed through Sofia and Plovdiv, reached Edirne, took ship to Alexandria, was chased out by a plague outbreak, sailed to Cyprus, then to Tripoli and Latakia, and walked to Aleppo in April 1820. He joined caravans and went by raft down the rivers: Urfa, Mardin, Mosul, Baghdad in July. Then Kermanshah, Hamadan and Tehran, where he wintered, and where he made a decision that tells you everything about how he thought about risk. He left behind his passport and papers, changed out of European clothes into Persian dress, and wrote his notes in Hungarian — to be passed on if he died on the road to Bukhara.
He reached Meshed in April 1821, Bukhara in November, Kabul in January 1822. He crossed into the Punjab, arrived in Lahore in March, pushed on through Amritsar, Jammu and Kashmir, and reached Leh, in Ladakh, in June 1822. The route to Yarkand beyond it was judged too dangerous, and so this man with no money, no official backing and no institution behind him simply waited, and studied, and looked for a way into Tibet.
"The Foreign Pupil"
He found one. In 1823 he entered Zanskar — the first European ever to visit the valley — and there, over an intense period of study under a local lama named Sangs-rgyas-phun-tshogs, he began the work that made his name. In Tibetan he was known as Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa: "the foreign pupil."
His teachers were more than language tutors. Through the lama he gained access to the Kangyur (100 volumes) and the bsTan-'gyur (224 volumes), the great encyclopedias of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist literature, which contained translations of Indian works whose originals were by then lost. To read them at all, he had to learn both the colloquial language and the classical register — and, when the lama's time ran short, he kept going without him.
The Winter at Yangla
The most quoted description of his working conditions comes from Dr. Alexander Gerard of the Bengal Medical Service, who traveled through Kunawar in 1828–29 introducing vaccination and visited Csoma at the monastery of Kanum. His report was addressed to the Government and published in extracts in the Government Gazette of 9 July 1829. What Gerard saw of Csoma's life at the monastery of Yangla, in Zanskar, he described like this:
"At that spot he, the Lama, and an attendant, were circumscribed in an apartment nine feet square for three or four months; they durst not stir out, the ground being covered with snow, and the temperature below the zero of the scale. There he sat, enveloped in a sheep-skin cloak, with his arms folded, and in this situation he read from morning till evening without fire, or light after dusk, the ground to sleep upon, and the bare walls of the building for protection against the rigours of the climate. The cold was so intense as to make it a task of severity to extricate the hands from their fleecy resort to turn over the pages." — Dr. Alexander Gerard, report of January 1829, quoted in Theodore Duka's Life and Works of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1885)
And then the sentence that measures the output of those months of frozen fingers:
"I have mentioned the above as a proof of the assiduity of Mr. Csoma, who collected and arranged 40,000 words of the Tibetan language in a situation that would have driven most men to despair." — Dr. Alexander Gerard, 1829
Suspected as a Spy, and the Honest Report
His situation was fragile in more ways than one. On his way back through Subathu in November 1824, Captain Kennedy arrested him on suspicion of being a spy — a European walking out of Tibet with an immense mass of manuscripts was not an ordinary sight. The misunderstanding was only cleared in May 1825, after a letter of introduction from the traveler William Moorcroft arrived to explain who he was.
Moorcroft's letter is the clearest statement of Csoma's own stated goal, and it uses the most modest word possible for what he intended to do:
"Mr. Csoma will endeavour to remain in Tibet until he shall have become master of the language of that country, and be completely acquainted with the subjects its literature contains." — William Moorcroft, letter of 21 April 1823
What happened next is why Csoma is such a useful model and not just an inspiring one. He went back into Zanskar for a second stretch of study, and it did not go as planned. His report to Captain Kennedy, written on 18 January 1827 and still held by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, does not spin the failure:
"I will not expatiate again on Tibetan literature … I was disappointed in my intentions by the indolence and negligence of that Lama to whom I returned. I could not finish my planned works as I had proposed and promised. I have lost my time and cost." — Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, report of 18 January 1827
Then, in the same report, the pivot that a good learner makes: he had brought back printed columns on grammar, chronology, astronomy and moral subjects; he had enough material for a grammar; he knew the structure of the language well enough to build the elementary work himself, and could translate most of the dictionary without help. He converted a failed plan into a completed one — and he had also spent his money carefully enough that Kennedy could report he had 150 rupees left of the 500 the Government had advanced more than two years earlier.
Kennedy's letter to the Sanskrit scholar Horace Hayman Wilson adds the detail that reveals the man. Of the nine Tibetan words Wilson had sent to Csoma to check, "he says there are five errors." And then:
"He declines any attention that I would be most happy to show him, and he lives in the most retired manner." — Captain Kennedy to Dr. H. H. Wilson, 17 January 1827
Kanum, Calcutta, and a Dictionary Nobody Else Could Have Written
From 1827 to 1830 Csoma lived at Kanum, in Upper Bashahr in the Simla Hill States, on a Government stipend of fifty rupees a month, working through the Tibetan manuscripts he had carried out of Ladakh. By the time he was done he had a dictionary and a grammar, and he walked to Calcutta to see them published. Dr. Gerard, visiting him there earlier, found him in what he called his "small but romantic hamlet, surrounded by books, and in the best health," and reported that the dictionary was nearly complete and the vocabulary far advanced.
In 1834, the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta printed two books that changed the study of Tibetan forever: Essay towards a Dictionary, Tibetan and English, prepared with the assistance of his lama teacher, and A Grammar of the Tibetan Language in English. Fifty copies of the two works reached London, and from there were forwarded onward. Csoma was elected an honorary member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1833 and of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1834, and from 1837 to 1841 he served as Librarian of the Asiatic Society. He had never held a university post, never had a patron in Europe paying his way, and never asked for financial help for his work.
The Method: Live Where the Language Lives
Csoma's technique had almost nothing in common with a modern study plan, and everything in common with a principle: put yourself where the language is unavoidable and stay there long enough for it to become ordinary.
When Major Lloyd, commanding the frontier station at Julpigori, offered him hospitality and attention in 1836, Csoma declined — not from pride, but because it would have cost him contact with local speakers. Duka notes that staying with senior Government officers "would deprive him of the intercourse with natives, whose familiarity it was his chief endeavour to cultivate." He was comfortable being the awkward foreigner at the small table if it meant the language kept coming at him all day.
The asceticism was part of the same strategy. He slept on bare earth, ate bread, curd cheese, fruit, salad, or boiled rice and tea, rarely ate meat, never drank alcohol, and was said to abstain from water for days. A man with no interest in comfort has no reason to go home early.
He also refused to be a specialist in one thing. He traveled under adapted local names — Sikander (from Alexander), with Rumi or Roome later, since he was understood to come from Rome; he signed himself "Secunder Roome." After 1836 he announced he would stay on to study Bengali and Sanskrit and "the principal dialects," and he was said to be able to read in seventeen languages.
The Destination He Never Reached
The only place he wanted to see and never saw was Lhasa. In 1842, at the age of 58, he set out for Tibet one more time. While traveling through the Terai he caught malaria, and on 11 April 1842 he died in Darjeeling. He was buried in the Old Cemetery there, in a grave the Asiatic Society of Bengal later marked with a memorial that still stands on the Archaeological Survey of India's list of monuments.
Dr. Archibald Campbell, who knew him in those final months, recorded the sentence that sums up what Csoma expected from the journey he never got to make:
"What would Hodgson, Turnour, and some of the philosophers of Europe not give to be in my place when I get to Lassa?" — Csoma to Dr. Archibald Campbell, recounted in Campbell's report and in Duka (1885)
Hungary remembered him. His home village changed its name to Csomakőrös in 1904. A society for the study of the Orient was founded in his name in 1920; postage stamps followed in 1932 and 1984; a statue of him was installed in Tokyo in 1933 when he was declared a bodhisattva by the Japanese. The tablet placed on his grave carries Count István Széchenyi's verdict:
"A poor lonely Hungarian, without applause or money but inspired with enthusiasm sought the Hungarian native country but in the end broke down under the burden." — Tablet on Csoma's grave, placed by the Hungarian government
There is a bitter footnote. Later philologists concluded that the Magyar homeland was never waiting in Tibet — the search was a dead end, and Hunfalvy and Vámbéry both wrote as if Csoma had wasted his life chasing an unripe speculation. Duka disputes that reading in his biography: no disappointment is recorded anywhere in Csoma's own letters, and Csoma never described his work as useless. He was, in fact, creating a discipline while he looked for a tribe. He is now called the founder of Tibetology — the man who made the language readable for everyone who came after him.
What a Learner Can Take from Csoma
Most of Csoma's circumstances are impossible to copy and unwise to romanticize: the isolation, the hunger, the malaria. But four things in his story transfer directly to anyone learning a language this year.
- Learn the language your material is in. He did not study Tibetan for its own sake. He needed Tibetan because the Kangyur and the bsTan-'gyur were in Tibetan, and no translation existed. Choosing the target language by what you actually want to read gives you a reason that survives bad days.
- Put yourself where the language is unavoidable. He declined comfortable, English-speaking hospitality because it reduced his contact with speakers. A weekly conversation hour you cannot skip does the same job as his refusal.
- Report failures without editing them. His 1827 report says plainly that a plan failed and time was lost — then lists what he salvaged and what he would build instead. That is the difference between a learner who continues and one who concludes they are not gifted.
- Volume, sustained, beats intensity in bursts. Reading from morning till evening in a nine-foot room produced 40,000 words. Whatever your daily number is, the thing that made Csoma's method work was that the number happened every single day, including the days when nothing else in his life worked.
The dictionary he compiled sold slowly, and he never saw Lhasa. But when the first Western scholars needed to open the Kangyur, the key was already in the press, written by a man who had walked to the mountains with no money, learned the language the hard way, and stayed long enough to write it down for everyone else. That is what self-education can look like at its most unreasonable — and at its most useful.