Hu Hsu

The Mother on Hu Hsu

October 30, 1962

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!

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 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

An exhibition of paintings by Hu Hsu at the Ashram in August, 1967

The Mother's Introduction to an exhibition of paintings by Hu Hsu at the Ashram in August, 1967