A compilation of articles & The Mother's remarks related to Hu Hsu
Xu Fancheng 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 one of Xu Fancheng's masters, wrote thus about him "... a scholar who is at once an artist and a yogi."
At his residence in Pondicherry
In his garden in Pondicherry
Hu Hsu 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 Hu Hsu, 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 Hu Hsu 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!
(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 Shu-Hu 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... .... But anyway, for the translation it should be Shu-Hu.
In the Playground
The Mother's Introduction to an exhibition of paintings by Hu Hsu at the Ashram in August, 1967
In September 2017, the Chinese Ambassador to India Mr. Luo Zhaohui visited Auroville and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Addressing a gathering at the 68th anniversary celebrations of the People’s Republic of China at New Delhi soon after his visits, Ambassador Zhaohui remembered Hu Hsu.
“Last week, I visited Pondicherry. It is one of my dreaming places. One of my teachers, Professor Xu Fancheng lived in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1945 to 1978. He was one of the most famous Chinese scholars, translating the Upanisad, Bhaghawad Gita, and Shakuntala from Sanskrit to Chinese. He also introduced Sri Aurobindo to China. More than 300 paintings of Professor Xu were kept in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Looking at his legacies, our eyes were full of tears. He was one of the bridges between our two countries ... In the history of bilateral engagement, there have been thousands of prominent persons like Professor Xu, including Xuanzang, Faxian, Bodhidharma and Tagore. We should never forget their contribution and legacies ... Standing on their shoulders, we should do more today....We should turn the old page and start a new chapter...”
Hu Hsu (pronounced Hu Shu) was born on 26th October, 1909, into a wealthy family in Changsha in the southern province of Hunan. His family was respected thanks to one of his ancestors, General Hsu. The Hsu family was successfully engaged in the business of silk. At elementary school, a young Mao Tse-tung was his history teacher. While he lived in the family house, Hu Hsu never had to handle money. Later, when he was given some money for the first time, he confided to Shanta, a friend in the Ashram, that he felt embarrassed and didn’t know how to deal with it.
A thorough classical education in literature and the arts was considered a necessary basis in his family. Lu Hsun, the noted writer and literary reformist, considered to be the founder of modern Chinese literature, became his friend and mentor. Hu Hsu studied History in the noted Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong and, thanks to Lu Hsun’s support, obtained a scholarship to study Fine Art and Philosophy in the prestigious University of Heidelberg in Germany from 1929 to 1932. His first major work was a translation of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra.
During the troubled days of the Sino-Japanese war, we do not know much about his whereabouts in China, but in 1945, just after the war ended, he decided to head towards the West, that is, towards India. He settled in Visva Bharati in Santiniketan to further his study of Sanskrit (he would go on to translate some works of the great classical poet Kalidasa from Sanskrit into Chinese), and teach the History of Chinese Buddhism at ‘Cheena Bhavan’, the Chinese study centre co-founded in 1937 by Rabindranath Tagore and Tan Yun-shan (who also visited the Ashram, met The Mother, and had the darshan of Sri Aurobindo in 1939). Tan Yun-shan once wrote, “...As in the past China was spiritually conquered by a great Indian, so in the future too she would be conquered by another great Indian, Sri Aurobindo, the Maha-Yogi who is the bringer of that light which will chase away the darkness that envelops the world to-day.” It is probably here that Hu Hsu first heard of Sri Aurobindo.
In Pondicherry
In 1951, Hu Hsu came to Pondicherry. Shortly after his arrival he wrote a poem which sheds some light on his first experiences (translated):
The Mother bestowed a flower for its blossom Other than offering a flower to the Mother, living in South India nothing else matters. Flower blossom, flower beautiful, flower can be divine, the divine itself silent, and the flower itself spring. Time flies, experience beyond the material is new, timeless divine knowledge is ever fresh. This flower, this leaf, the essence of the present moment, this is the way to realization.
The Mother saw his potential – not only was he a scholar and master of many languages, but he also had the desire to translate Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s books into Chinese. Eventually he was given the Villa Orphelia to stay in, a large colonial mansion with a large garden in the French town, on Rue Dumas, right next to the Ashram Nursing Home today. He was working tremendously hard, fourteen hours a day. Manuscripts were quickly piling up, as well as brush paintings. Mother had brought back from Japan some calligraphy material and She gave some to Hu Hsu so he could continue to paint. When, in 1967, he exhibited his paintings in the Exhibition Hall of the Ashram, The Mother wrote a very special introduction: “Here are the paintings of a scholar who is at once an artist and a yogi, exhibited with my blessings.”
In a conversation dated October 30, 1962, she praised him as being a genius who was in fact coining new Chinese words to better translate Sri Aurobindo. She spoke highly of his translations and referred to one of his letters in which Hu Hsu wrote to a friend, “If you want to experience Taoism, come to live in the Ashram, you will have the REALISATION of Lao-Tseu’s philosophy.” The Mother added: “This man is a sage.”
Chinese Section at the Ashram School
In 1954, Nandlal Patel had just shifted his business from Pondicherry to Hong Kong. There he worked to start the Sri Aurobindo Philosophical Circle of Hong Kong, for which the Mother gave the message: “Let the eternal Light dawn on the eastern horizon.”
While in Hong Kong, Nandlal received a letter from Jayantilal (in-charge of the Ashram Archives) telling him that Mother wanted him to buy a Chinese printing press and have it shipped to Pondicherry. The Mother added that a compositor should also be recruited as Hu Hsu could not do the printing work himself. So an ad was sent to a newspaper looking for a young assistant willing to go to India. 17 applicants replied, and Mother chose a young man from the list named Kau Tam Sing to come and help Hu Hsu. Nandlal Patel recalls:
Hu Hsu had just written to him, “This is the Divine’s work”, and Kau Tam Sing was ready, not asking the questions any ordinary person would have asked…A house was rented where Hu Hsu and Kau Tam Sing would stay. Hu Hsu used to get up to check that Kau Tam Sing was sleeping well, he cared for his wellbeing as if he were his son.”
And so the Chinese Section of the Sri Aurobindo Centre of Education was born, with the blessings of the Mother. Hu Hsu single-handedly translated twenty books in twenty-eight years, including The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Human Cycle, the Upanishads, On Education, among many others. He also wrote a few original pieces on the true meaning of Confucianism, and on the origins and deeper meaning of Chinese characters, thus showing a rare mastery of Indian as well as Chinese culture and spirituality. All the books he printed stated that they were “…dedicated to THE DIVINE MOTHER to WHOM the writer remains in permanent gratitude as it is only with HER boundless Compassion and Grace that this book has come into being”.
In the Ashram: a friend and a teacher
In his house on Rue Dumas, Hu Hsu would often welcome his friends. He would also visit his neighbours, Ange and Peter Steiger. They remember Hu Hsu’s affability and kindness and the fact that he spoke very good German, much better than his English it seems, which was rather hard to understand! He once shared with Peter a breathing technique he was using: inhale and welcome what you want, and exhale and reject what you don’t want!
Ange, 4 years old at the time, loved him dearly and still remembers fondly how he would greet his neighbours’ children when they ran into his study room, showing them his many brushes and other painting material. This man who worked tirelessly never seemed to be annoyed by their visits. A few children of the Ashram would also learn the art of Chinese painting under his guidance.
Hu Hsu loved to play the Chinese game of Go (called ‘wei chi’ in Chinese) and aspiring players like Vijay, Roy Chvat, Gary Miller, Steve Phillips, Ingo and Gerhardt Stettner used to meet in his house every week. Roy still carries on the legacy of Go in Auroville.
Hu Hsu was also a regular walker and cyclist, and every Sunday with Pierre Legrand or Peter, he used to throw divination sticks to determine whether they would go cycling or walking, and for deciding on the direction in which they should proceed. Pondicherry then was a walkers’ and cyclists’ paradise! They would visit Auroville, or the canyons near Utility. Once after a long walk, he explained how to restore one’s energy levels: “…concentrate the consciousness in the feet, or gaze at the emerald green of a paddy field.”
Sybille Hablik in her book 30 Years in India writes about him:
“He was tall and slender but strongly built. We often saw him, dressed in Indian white pajamas and riding a bicycle, wearing a green eye-shade….Hu Hsu invited us to join him on Chinese New Year’s day. We found him in his roomy colonial house sitting at a two-metre long table with a black glass top. We offered him a flat covered basket of fruits and wished him a Happy New Year. He had promised to paint something for me, so before our very eyes bamboos were magicked onto a big sheet of paper. I held my breath as I followed the movements of his huge brush: one stroke – the stem; a small diagonal curve – the growth node; another vertical stroke – the bamboo is growing; a thin line and a few points: there are four narrow pointed leaves.
With silent attention we followed the light, sure movements of the ink-brush – we were experiencing perfect skill.
Hu Hsu led us to two cupboards that contained the whole of Chinese history in the form of many individual books. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is an official edition of which only three copies exist. This is one of them, the other two are in my homeland’.
A melancholy shadow fell on the three of us at last, as Hu Hsu played patriotic Chinese marches to us on his gramophone. It was a memorable meeting and for me, it was the beginning of a lasting friendship.
Today, the rare books on Chinese history are still preciously kept in a cupboard in the Ashram Library.”
Auroville
On the day of the foundation ceremony, the Auroville Charter was read out in the four languages of Auroville (French, Tamil, English and Sanskrit), and then in Chinese and Arabic. Hu Hsu translated the Charter, and the son of a Chinese dentist based in Madras read the Chinese text. The earth from both the Republic of China (Taiwan) and from the People’s Republic of China (Mainland) were poured into the urn by Ashram youth (Kanu Dey and Vimala Sandalingam for Taiwan, and Bokul Chakravarty and Hema Singh for Mainland China).
In an article in Nan Yang Siang Pau, a newspaper in Singapore, Hu Hsu introduced the project of Auroville to the Chinese-speaking world and spoke about building “…a Pavilion which can represent the culture and arts achievements of the great Chinese civilisation”, and invited Chinese scholars and artists to participate.
17th November, 1973
Roy recalls an incident on the fateful night The Mother left her body: “[Hu Hsu] was a very special kind of person. He once told me he could look at somebody and tell if he was going to die or not. I said, ‘Oh it’s interesting!’ He said that well, it wasn’t interesting, because when the Japanese had invaded China, everywhere he looked he saw people about to die. […]
I used to play Go with him. On November 17th, in the middle of the game, he stands up and says, ‘Let’s stop playing.’ I looked at the clock: it was 7.25p.m. He says, ‘It would be good if She could live up to a hundred’.”
Return to China
In 1978, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Hu Hsu decided to go back to his homeland. A young man from Hong Kong, Desmond Hsu (Ramana) arranged his ticket and travelled with him. In Delhi, he stopped to get his Chinese passport for he had come to India before the People’s Republic of China had been founded in 1949. He stopped for a while at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi Branch. There Hu Hsu spoke at length with Tara Jauhar and did two paintings for her. She remembers, “He spent a long hour in conversation with my father and both of them, I remember, were very emotional. He left my father’s room and I helped him with his luggage to the taxi as he left for the airport and China.”
Back in China, he joined the Institute of World Religions, a department in the well-known Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Living much the same way as he had lived in the Ashram – quietly by himself – he remained engrossed in his inner quest. He continued his study, writing, and painting work, and shared his vast knowledge and experiences with fellow scholars and students. Soon he became known as one of the foremost Chinese scholars on Indian culture and spirituality.
His colleagues saw a remarkable similarity between him and the legendary Hsüan-tsang, the Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled to India in the 7th century, lived at Nalanda, learnt and translated the original Buddhist sutras, and returned to China with the sacred knowledge of the West (India). The parallel with Hu Hsu’s own life is striking. His contribution is seen as particularly significant since he translated and returned to China with new sacred knowledge – the ancient pre-Buddhist spiritual knowledge of the Upanishads and the Gita, as also the contemporary spiritual knowledge contained in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings. After his return, Hu Hsu came to be known as Hsu Fan-cheng (also written as Xu Fancheng) – the one purified by the realisation of the Brahman consciousness.
On 6th March, 2000, Hu Hsu left his body.
New Horizons
But his story is not over. While Hu Hsu’s translations could not be sold in China of the 1970s, there is a growing interest in his writings today, and through him, in Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s philosophy and vision. His students and colleagues in Beijing brought out his Collected Works in 2006, and the response to them has been very positive with Universities in China starting to read Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, and a few students studying his works, and even the Integral Yoga, as part of their doctoral theses. Discussions are also underway to open the first Centre for the study of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings in China. A small but growing number of Chinese-speaking seekers also visit the Ashram and Auroville inspired by the works of Hu Hsu, a few of them even choosing to settle down.
One can only hope and pray that the Mother’s message given 55 years ago is indeed starting to take shape before our eyes, in our own times:
“Let the eternal Light dawn on the eastern horizon.”
Source: An article by Eric Avril & Devdip Ganguli, published in Auroville Today in January 2018 (Issue No: 342)
Wars, famine, state failure, revolutions, reform, economic boom. Most people in the world cannot think of much else when it comes to 20th-century China. To be honest, even most Chinese cannot think beyond them. They cannot imagine that a scholar from a society of constant upheavals could find a place to immerse himself in his quest for spirituality and life's meaning. But that is exactly what Xu Fancheng (1903-2000), a leading researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), did in India.
In ancient times, Chinese scholars used to travel to India to study Buddhism and to bring back Buddhist scriptures, some of which have been well documented in history. But Xu spent a much longer time there than any of them, although he did not have to walk or ride horses and camels across deserts and snow-capped mountains to reach his "dreamland".
For 33 quiet and, for most part, penniless years, Xu worked as hard as the ancient pilgrims, studying and translating India's classical and modern writings. He was unaffected even by the loss of family members and the change of the national government back home. He spent most of those years in Sri Aurobindo Ashram, an education center founded by Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and led by Mirra Alfassa (known as the Mother, 1878-1973), in Pondicherry, southern India, where he started translating some of Sri Aurobindo's key philosophical works.
It was not until 1978, when a friend from Hong Kong convinced him that China was beginning to reform and open up and might make room for his intellectual quest, did he think of returning home.
When he arrived in Beijing, as his former CASS assistant Sun Bo recalls while talking to China Daily, "the old scholar had nothing except a little money from his Hong Kong friend no company and no personal belongings other than his manuscripts". Nor was there a homecoming ceremony, like the one presided over by the emperor when the famous Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang (602-664) returned from his 17-year study tour to India. After the long absence, the motherland seemed a strange place to Xu in many ways. Very few people could remember who he was unless they went through the Chinese editions of Nietzsche, some of which Xu had translated while studying in Germany in the 1930s. Or, they could find his name in the research on Lu Xun (1881-1936). Lu Xun had a large following among young intellectuals who, angry at the state of the country, went to him for inspiration and to get their articles published in his magazine. Xu was one of them.
But like Sri Aurobindo, his Indian inspiration, Xu turned from being a radical young intellectual into a thinker, making Eastern philosophy his source of spirituality, something China shared with India in ancient times and could still be valuable for modern man's existence. And it will be more than being valuable, as we can know from Xu's writings and, more importantly, derive from his entire body of research. He re-emphasizes that man's inevitable journey from the industrial and bureaucratic systems of the modern times will be toward moral independence and spiritual well-being.
As Xu has said: "In a way, the destiny of mankind has been determined by the philosophies of ancient Greece, India and China, each with its genuine and independent roots. Without those, neither the Eastern civilizations nor that of the West can be thinkable If there is any meaning of academic research, and if it is to provide any useful service to mankind, then it must be to prepare for the coming of a great future - by revisiting the profound lessons of the past."
Xu was one of the scholars who, after being educated in the Chinese and Greek classics at home, had the luxury of spending a long time to focus on Indian philosophy and teachings. He had the longevity, too, which allowed him another 20-odd years to write about his experiences and thoughts without much interference. As his former CASS colleagues recall, Xu was exempted by leaders in his research institute from attending most of the staff meetings.
Among the huge number of Xu's translations in Chinese are the Bhagavad-Gita, 50 of the Upanishads, and the major works of Sri Aurobindo (such as The Life Divine and Essays on the Gita) and the Mother, who incidentally was also his close friend. Xu lived alone in an apartment in a six-story building without an elevator in eastern Beijing till his death in 2000.
Xu Fancheng's collected works, published in 16 volumes by the Shanghai Joint Publishing Company in 2006, show that he was not only a translator of Indian philosophical works. He was also an original writer, and even though most of his own creations are relatively short, they cover an extensive range, reflecting deeply on Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, as well as classical Grecian philosophy.
But Sun Bo, Xu's assistant in his later years, says the collected volumes do not contain all of his works. Some manuscripts, particularly the last book he was writing on Buddhism, went missing after his death. Xu's death, incidentally, was a non-event like his return from India. But now, almost a decade later, his standing as a scholar of very high repute has grown across the country. His translation of the Upanishads has been reprinted twice, according to its editor Huang Yansheng, of the Chinese Social Sciences Publishing. The Upanishads primarily discuss philosophy, meditation and the nature of God, and form the core spiritual thought of and mystic contemplations of the four Vedas. In Indian philosophy terms, they are known as Vedanta (or the culmination of the Vedas). "We have orders not just from universities and libraries," Huang says. "There have been individuals, too, from various backgrounds (who have ordered Xu's translations). They call us either to ask where they can buy it, or to request us to buy a copy for them."
Thanks primarily to Xu's efforts some Chinese universities have started teaching Sri Aurobindo's works, Sun Bo says. Indeed, on popular Chinese online search site Baidu.com (on the web as well as the news search) Xu Fancheng is no longer an obscure name. At least two biographies of Xu have been published as his life story and his translations of Indian classical text attract widespread intellectual attention.
But why? Why are an old, lonely scholar born a century ago and the stuff that used to be called "Oriental mysticism" and spirituality drawing people's attention today when most students in China and India, as well the entire developing world, are being taught Western rationalism?
When Xu was pursuing his vocation single-mindedly, Chinese youths were flocking to Western countries' embassies or consul offices to apply for student visas. It was a time when science and technology were considered the best formula to change China. Who would think of going to India to study philosophy in a dead language called Sanskrit when GDP is considered the best measurement of progress? says Yang Xusheng, a philosopher and professor of Sinology in the Renmin University of China.
"As it has turned out, it is not a road (the GDP road) on which you can travel very far," Yang says. "It is also getting very crowded, especially because Chinese and Indians have started joining in. So we have a crisis.
We have come to realize that seeing some of us become morally and spiritually hollow is as much painful an experience as seeing other people inadequately nourished and sheltered."
Xu's research is unique, Yang says, for it reminds people that in order to seek a balanced life and economy, we have to go back to the questions raised by the first thinkers of our civilizations - the Chinese, Indian, and Greek - and to integrate all their inspirations.
"Haven't you heard what Xu said he wanted to do but could not find the time for?" Yang says. "He had plans to translate the Bible and the Koran again to give Chinese readers a better translation of the holy books. And do you know why he wanted to do that?"
Source: You Nuo (China Daily) 2009-12-17(China Daily 12/17/2009 page 9)
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