274 Traditions of Buddhism
who was supposedly in China from 1275 to I29I. Yet these earlyEuropean travellers' interest in and knowledge of Buddhism
remained limited. Possibly the earliest sustained attempt to
understand Buddhist thought by a European is represented by
the Jesuit father Ippolito Desideri, who spent five years in the.
Tibetan capital, Lhasa, at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury, endeavouring to come to grips with Tsong kha pa's pre-
sentation of Madhyamaka Buddhist thought.^32
A European tradition of oriental and Buddhist scholarship-associated with such names as William Jones ( 1746-94), Alex-
ander Csoma de Koros (1798-1842), Eugene Bumouf (180!-52),
Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), T. W. Rhys Davids (1843'""
1922), Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920), Theodor Stcherbatsky(1866-1942), Louis de La Vallee Poussin (1869-1938), Giuseppe
Tucci ( 1894-1984), and Etienne Lamotte ( 1903-83)-began to make
available in Europe translations of Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan
texts.^33 These fed the imaginations of the likes of Schopenhauer
(1788-1860), Emerson (1863-82), Thoreau (1817-1862), W. B.
Yeats (1865-1939), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).
Following this firing of the European imagination, the final years
of the nineteenth century saw Europeans beginning to set off for
A:sia not just as civil servants or scholars, but in search of 'the
wisdom of the east': in 1890 Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott,
who had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 in New York,
publicly took the refuges and precepts in Sri Lanka; in 1898 Allan
Bennett, a former member of the esoteric Order of the Golden
Dawn, left Bdtain, travelling to Sri Lanka and then on to Burma,
where in 1901 he was ordained as the Buddhist monk Ananda
Metteyya; Anthon Gueth (1878-1956) made a similar trip from
Germany to ordain as Nyanatiloka in 1904, returning to Sri
Lanka to found the Dodanduwa 'Island Hermitage' in 19u; in
1912 the remarkable Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David-
Nee! (r868-1969),had an audience with the thirteenth Dalai Lama
in Kalimpong and subsequently spent many years in Sikkim and
Tibet involved in Buddhist practice.
Back in Europe and America various Buddhist groups were