Just Curious

Hsu Ti-Shan (1893-1941)

Hsu Ti-Shan is one of my favorite novelist and essayist who wrote in modern Chinese. A scholar who had written many profound studies in Buddhist and Taoist philosophies and logic, he was also a historian, a poet, an aesthete and a Christian minister.

Born 1893 in Tainan, Taiwan, into a well-do-do family of literati, he was brought up in the Province of Fukien, after Taiwan was ceded to Japan in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. After a stint on the faculties of the Hsia Men Normal School and the Chinese School in Rangoon, Burma, he enrolled the Yenching University in Beijing, then a missionary-run college. It was roughly about this time that he converted to Protestanism, although he had never quite become a fundamentalist, as most Chinese believers at that time tended to be.

It was also his dissatisfaction with the doctrinal precisionism of fundamentalist Christianity that led him to the study of theology and comparative religion. After graduating with degrees in arts and divinity, in 1923 he won a fellowship to study for a master's in comparative religion at Columbia. After some further studies at Oxford he returned to his alma mater Yenching, where he became Professor of History in 1926. His area of research during this period is mostly about the history of religious movements in China, with particular attention given to Buddhist philosophy. In 1935 he was forced to resign by the increasingly anti-Communist administration at Yenching, who suspected him of being a fellow-traveler. He gladly accepted an appointment as the Foundation Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong later the same year, and spent the last phase of his life in Hong Kong. In 1941, shortly before the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, Professor Hsu passed away.

I love his mastery of the Chinese language, and his mystical view of human existence. His grip of human psychology and observation of the subtlest of human emotional activities render his choice of words incisive, clean and a real pleasure to read.

Here's Professor Derk Bodde of the University of Pennsylvania's obituary for Professor Hsu. Prof. Bodde was a former student of his back in the bad old days of 1930s:

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3/4 (Feb., 1942) , pp. 403-404

posted by James Chang @ 6:20 PM