Antonio de Montserrat - the Silk Road and the secret paths of Tantra

This article presents Antonio de Montserrat’s biography to insert him in Buddhist critical thinking as whom is considered the first Westerner initiated into tantric philosophy and who became a driver thereof in the West through the Society of Jesus. To do so, a historical review is first presented to focus on the way Buddhism was removed from India and found refuge among the peoples of Central Asia such as the Uyghurs in present-day Turkistan, how it was then adopted by Chinese emperors and spread throughout the Silk Road. The combination of Indian Buddhism and Western influences (Greco-Buddhism) gave rise to several Buddhist schools in Central Asia and China. Then, the esoteric form Buddhism took (tantra) is briefly described, which was consolidated as Vajrayana (tantric) Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century. That is the Buddhist form rulers have adopted, which promotes full social and gender equality, the idea of ​​the subject as a cultural construction and the notion of metaphorical deities —useful to model people’s character but completely non-existent— in addition to the Buddhist principle of relative truth (not absolute). This non theistic view —or transtheistic, as Gómez would rather call, was projected in the absolute religious tolerance within the Chinese, Uyghur, and Mongolian empires, which ensured safety and free exchange on the Silk Route. Such standpoint of people not divided into castes or differentiated by reason of bloodline is what amazes de Montserrat when saying Tibetans "have no kings among them" and what encourages those who made a journey (based on de Montserrat’s writings) especially to receive initiation into Tibetan Tantric Buddhism such as Jesuits Antonio de Andrade and John de Brito. Finally, the article jumps in Antonio de Montserrat’s biography and it shows its connection with tantrism.