The Chinese are busy boning up on English, but few know that many
English words have roots in the language of their neighbor India.
"Mandarin", the English word for an official in imperial China,
for example, is derived from the Sanskrit word "mantri", which
means counselor; and "orange" has its origins in the Sanskrit name
of the fruit.
It is through the efforts of Ji Xianlin-considered by many to be
the country's foremost Indologist-and his students that many
Chinese got to know the language of Sanskrit, the epic Ramayana and
other achievements of Indian civilization.
In a rare honor, the Indian government conferred Ji the Padma
Bhushan-one of the country's top civilian awards-on Republic Day on
Saturday. The 97-year-old scholar is the first Chinese to receive
the award.
Wang Bangbei, a professor of Sanskrit at Peking University, told
the Times of India newspaper: "This is a great event. The award
will have a positive effect on the way ordinary Chinese look at
India."
Ji chose to major in Sanskrit in 1936, when he was a student at
the University of Gottingen in Germany. The reason was that
"Chinese culture has been so much influenced by Indian culture, and
great discoveries can be made in research on the two nations'
cultural relationship," he wrote in his best-selling biography 10
Years in Germany.
In the following seven decades, he made discoveries not only
about the spread of Buddhism from India to China but also about the
export of the skills of making paper and silk from China to
India.
He wrote seven books, including a short history of India, apart
from translating Ramayana from the original Sanskrit to Chinese in
poetry form.
He did the translation secretly during the "cultural revolution"
(1966-76). His memoir of the 10-year turmoil, titled Memoirs
from the Cowshed and published in 1998, touched the hearts of
millions of Chinese readers with the dignity of an intellectual in
the face of both physical and mental torture.
(China Daily January 28, 2008)
