During his years in Tibet (1717–1722), the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri succeeded in extracting a very precise definition of the metaphysical absolute from the texts of the "Middle Way" Buddhist philosophers that he was able to study in the Gelugpa academies thanks to his rapid mastery of the Tibetan language. Nevertheless, it is just this kind of absolute that the "central philosophy of Tibet" (Mādhyamika-Prāsangika) firmly negates with its assertion of the absence of inherent metaphysical substrate (nihsvabhava) in both the relative (samvrttisatya) and absolute (paramārthasatya) dimensions of reality. Employing an original strategy based on his own intellectual and intuitive orientation, Desideri sought out a Tibetan linguistic structure that might be analogous to the Thomist-Suaresian-Aristotelian notion of God-as-Absolute in which he had been trained at the Roman College. In order to do this, he delved into an interpretation of śūnyatā (the Buddhist term for the metaphysical voidness of phenomena) aimed at asserting its convergence with the notion of the contingency and dependence of the created order recognized in Baroque Scholasticism. In so doing, Desideri began to articulate views already known to the Tibetan Gelugpa scholars in their long struggle against the ideas of Dolpopa Shes rab rGyal mtshan (1292–1361), founder of the Jonang school, which asserted the necessarily permanent existence of voidness as an absolute. This voidness-absolute, devoid of all that is contingent, is the metaphysical basis in the Jonang system for the attainment of enlightenment. Developing his own responses to the doctrine of voidness as articulated in the Tibetan translations of the works of Nāgārjuna, Desideri underwent a transformation with both theological and psychological features, not without manifesting elements of human frailty.
