Darjeeling has been visited by several great personalities from different fields and some of them even resided in Darjeeling for some time, Alexander Csoma De Koros was one among them. He was a Hungarian Linguist, philologist, traveller and Orientalist, born in Koros, Hungary on 4th April 1784. He set off to Asia in 1820 and spent his lifetime studying the Tibetan language and Buddhist philosophy . He was the author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book. He was called Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa in Tibetan, meaning “the foreign pupil” and was given the title of Bosatsu or Boddhisatva (Buddhist sainthood) by the Japanese in 1933.
In fact, he was the first author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book and he was able to read in seventeen languages. Csoma de Kőrös is considered as the founder of Tibetology . Csoma joined the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1831, In 1833 he was elected as an Honorary member of the Asiatic Society. In 1834 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society. From 1837 to 1841, he worked as Librarian of the Asiatic Society.
The opening up of Tibetan studies to western scholars was largely due to the pioneering works of Alexander Csoma De Koros starting from his native land, he went on foot and all alone from Hungary and mostly in this way arrived at Lahore then at Srinagar in Kasmir to the peaks of Himalayas then at the monastery of Zangla village in Ladakh , India. Completing approximately 12,000 km in search of the original homes of the Hungarians, thought to be somewhere in Central Asia this remarkable Hungarian eventually reached the Western Borderlands of Tibet and devoted the rest of his life to the study of Tibetan language and literature.
