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Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c15.s2.t20: Xu Fancheng

Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c15.s2.t20

Language
English

Xu Fancheng

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Xu Fancheng (or Hu Hsu, or Fan-Cheng Hsu, October 26, 1909 - March 6, 2000), also named as “Hu” or “Shiquan”, was a philosopher, translator, one of the most well-known Indologists in China and a researcher at the Research Institute of World Religions of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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He was born into a wealthy family in Changsha, Hunan Province, on October 26, 1909 and was the youngest son of the family. He received strict traditional education as a child, and later received modern education at Yali High School, a US church school in Changsha. His father had wished him to go to the well-known Xiangya School of Medicine, but in 1926, the Northern Expedition was under way, he had to give up medicine and went to study history at Wuchang National Sun Yat-sen University. In the following summer, he left Wuhan for Shanghai to study at the Department of Western Literature of Fudan University, meanwhile, he also took literature and medicine courses at Nanking University, and studied German on his own. In May 1928, he met Lu Xun in a lecture at Fudan University and maintained contact with the latter from then on. In August 1929, Xu went to Germany to study at the Department of Philosophy of Heidelberg University, and he also took courses on literature and history of western arts at University of Berlin.

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Xu Fancheng

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During this period, at the library of Heidelberg University, he studied Sanskrit and began to read *Tripitaka* and developed an interest in Buddhism. In August 1932, his father was seriously ill, and he returned and settled in Shanghai. Recommended by Lu Xun, he began to write essays for *Ziyoutan* (Talks on Liberty, a supplement of *Shenbao*, and published *Nisha Zashi*). In 1934, he translated and published Nietzsche’s *Also sprach Zarathustra*, *Daybreak*, *Happy Knowledge*, *Autobiography*, *Goethe’s Comments on his Faust* and the like, and became the first one in China to translate and study Nietzsche’s works. After the Anti-Japanese War broke out in 1937, he taught at Central College of Arts and moved to Yunnan, Chongqing and other places. In 1940, he went to Chongqing as an editor of the *Book Monthly* at Central Library and a professor at Central University. In early 1945, through a cultural exchange program between China and India, he went to Visva-Bharati University to teach the philosophy of Ouyang Jingwu at Cheena Bhavana, he stayed in India for 33 years and turned to study Buddhism and Indian religions. In 1947, he translated a Sanskrit version of *Anhui Sanshi Weishi Shushi* on the basis of translations in the Wei, Chen and Tang Dynasty as well as a collated version of the French scholar Levy. In 1950, he went to Benares (now Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh) to continue with Sanskrit study, and there he translated *Bhagavad Gita* - a Hindu scripture, and Kalidasa’s *Meghadūta*. In 1951, he went to Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry in the south of India and became the Dean of the Department of Chinese of International Center of Education. There, for more than 20 years, he had devoted to studying spiritual philosophy and yogacara, writing and translating. At the end of 1978, he returned to China by way of Hong Kong, and from 1979, he worked as a researcher at the Research Institute of World Religions of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. On March 6, 2000, he died of pneumonia at Peking Union Medical College Hospital at the age of 91.

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Xu Fancheng was well versed in English, German, French, Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. He was a good painter, a versatile scholar, and had an in-depth study of Chinese civilisation as well as Indian and Western ones. With a mastery of languages, he was concerned with inherent connection between languages and national and regional cultures, and attempted to interpret linguistic and cultural exchange from a semantic perspective. He had a broad academic horizon, combined academic traditions in China and India with Orientalism study in Germany, and proposed many unique opinions, which are of important value and meaning for sociological, anthropological and folklore study. He compared Sanskrit to Changsha dialect from phonological point to demonstrate the profound influence of Buddhism on native languages in China and cultural exchange and assimilation between China and India, providing new approaches and aspirations for India studies in China.

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As for China-India cultural exchange, Xu Fancheng was reputed for his translations of works of Indian religions and philosophies, he was the first Chinese scholar who systematically introduced the Upanishads into China. While teaching at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, he made use of its rich collection of books to select 50 out of more than 100 texts of the Upanishads, which he thought to be the most influential and typical, and successively translated them into classical Chinese so as to preserve the original language’s simplicity and elegance, and a poetic style was used to reflect the lyric and rhythmic characteristics of the original texts. He also adopted

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Xu Fancheng's translated version of *'Wushi Aoyi shu'*

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the style of Lisao and ancient Chinese poetry in his translations of *Bhagavad Gita* and *Meghadūta*, and exhibited a superb mastery of language. In 1984, China Social Sciences Press published his translation under the title “*Fifty Texts of the Upanishads*”, and in the “Preface” there was a detailed account of the historical origin of the Upanishads, its rich and varying thoughts, its important position in the history of Indian philosophy and religion and its impact on the world. By translating the Upanishads, he filled an important blank in China with respect to the history of ancient Indian philosophies and religions. His another important contribution is the study and translation of Sri Aurobindo Ghose, a renowned philosophy in modern India. He published *A Biographical Sketch of Sri Aurobindo Ghose* in 1954;, translated and published in Hong Kong the *Essays on the Gita* in 1957; translated the first three volumes of *The Integral Yoga* in 1959, and the fourth volume in 1987, which was published by the Commercial Press under the title “*Yujia Lun*”; translated Aurobindo’s *Heraclitus* and published it under the title “*Xuanli Cantong*”, which is easier to understand for Chinese readers. During his 28 years stay at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, he translated into modern vernacular Chinese an English handbook that contained what Aurobindo had said, and titled it “*Zhoutian Ji*”, the language of which is fluent, easy to understand, full of philosophical, and vividly reproduces the charm of Aurobindo’s verses. Back to China, he translated and published *The Life Divine* in 1984. He also collected answers and interpretations on yoga given by Mirra Richard, whom Aurobindo called “The Mother”, and compiled them into six volumes under the title “*The Mother*”. His translations of Sri Aurobindo Ghose’s works are widely circulated in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, and attached great importance by academic circles at home and abroad, and they also play an important role in disseminating the thoughts in *The Integral Yoga*, and he had an indelible contribution to India-China cultural exchange.

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As an important figure in the history of cultural exchange between China and India, his thoughts and works are receiving more and more attention from academic circles in China and India. In 2006, the “Year of India-China Friendship”, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences collected his writings and published, through East China Normal University Press, *The Collection of Works of Xu Fancheng*, which consists of four volumes of his works, 12 volumes of his translations and about 6.5 million Chinese characters. In October 2010, Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry celebrated the 101ˢᵗ anniversary of his birth, and exhibited a number of paintings that he drew while in India.

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(Jiang Jingkui)

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