Biography of Hsu Hu

Xu Fancheng Chinese: 徐梵澄

Pondicherry in fact has played a prominent role in cultural exchanges between India and China in modern times. This is due to the influence of the Chinese scholar, who lived in Pondicherry for 27 years. His name was Xu Fancheng, also called the "Modern Xuanzang".

Xu Fancheng was born in Changsha, Hunan province, on 26th October 1909. As a child he studied classical Chinese. In 1929 he went to Germany to study the History of Art at Heidelberg University. He also practiced wood engraving there and became the first Chinese artist of the new style wood engraving. He came back to China in 1932, and encouraged by Luxun (one of the most famous writers of modern China), he started to translate the works of Nietzsche from German into Chinese, and became the first expert of Nietzsche's philosophy in China.

At the end of 1945, he joined the cultural exchange program between India and China, taught in Rabindranath Tagore International University. But the exchange program was cut short after the fall of the Nationalist Government in China, and so he went to Varanasi, the Indian holy city to relearn Sanskrit.

In 1951, he arrived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, in the south of India. He lived there for 27years and plunged himself into teaching, translating, writing, and the practice of yoga. He translated several Indian classics, as also the major works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He thus became the only person in China who had studied thoroughly the ancient Vedantic, and the modern philosophy of India. He returned to mainland China in 1978 and worked as a researcher in the Department of Religion in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, until passed away on 6th March, 2000,at Beijing itself.

Xu Fancheng is a master of classical Chinese poetry, calligraphy, sculpture, and painting, had also mastered 8 ancient and modern languages, and was a great scholar of Chinese, Western, and Indian cultures. For 33 years, Xu Fancheng led a peaceful, humble life in India. He studied and translated classical and modern Indian texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, 50 verses of the Upanishads and the major works of Sri Aurobindo, including Life Divine, and The Mother, who was a close personal friend. And the Mother, who was one of Xu Fancheng's masters, wrote thus about him "... a scholar who is at once an artist and a yogi."

The Mother On Hu Hsu

October 30, 1962

My translation [of The Synthesis of Yoga] will be finished soon - I'll miss it.

But aren't you going to start on Savitri?

It suddenly seemed terribly ambitious to me.... (Laughing) My stock of words isn't so great!

(silence)

Hu.Hsu. [A Chinese disciple who translates Sri Aurobindo into Chinese.] has written to me, and there was a sentence in his letter that brought a certain problem to my attention. He said, "I have done so many hours of translation - it's a mechanical task." I wondered what he meant by "mechanical task" because, as far as I am concerned, you can't translate unless you have the experience - if you start translating word for word, it no longer means anything at all. Unless you have the experience of what you translate, you can't translate it. Then I suddenly realized that the Chinese can't translate the way we do! In Chinese, each character represents an idea rather than a separate word; the basis is ideas, not words and their meanings, so translation must be a completely different kind of work for them. So I started identifying with H.S., to understand how he is translating Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga into Chinese characters - he's had to find new characters! It was very interesting. He must have invented characters. Chinese characters are made up of root-signs, and the meaning changes according to the positions of the root-signs. Each root-sign can be simplified, depending on where it's placed in combination with other root-signs - at the top of the character, at the bottom, or to one side or the other. And so, finding the right combination for new ideas must be a fascinating task! (I don't know how many root-signs can be put in one character, but some characters are quite large and must contain a lot of them; as a matter of fact, I have been shown characters expressing new scientific discoveries, and they were very big.) But how interesting it must be to work with new ideas that way! And H.S. calls it a "mechanical task."

The man's a genius!

And he has experiences, too. We've hardly ever spoken together, but I have seen some letters he wrote. To one person he said, "If you want the Taoist experience, all you have to do is come here and live at the Ashram - you will have the REALIZATION of Lao-Tse's philosophy."

He's a sage!

The Mothers Agenda-Volume-03 -October 30-1962

October 10, 1970

(Mother gives "Transformation" flowers and slips one into her

buttonhole, then mentions again the translation of the

introduction of On the Way to Supermanhood.)

I also thought I would ask Hu Hsu to do it in Chinese. That would be good.

Shall I ask him for you?

Yes, tell him that I ask him to do it, if he wants to. If we could send it to China ... There's a Chinese in Santiniketan, but I am no longer in touch with him (he gave all his goods to Communist China, and he's staying there). He's a philosopher, a very intelligent man.... But anyway, for the translation it should be Hu. Hsu

For the German, I don't know.... We have many Germans, but I don't know.

As for the book, it will do like The Adventure, it will spread little by little.

The Mothers Agenda