TOKYO -- Professor Michael Witzel, the sanskritist, classical philologist, scholar of comparative mythology, and author of The Origins of the World's Mythologies, invited your author to Harvard in 2010 so that he could use library resources of the earliest European missionaries to China dating back to 1649 (in the original!); materials that we couldn't come by in Peking University. Although there was little funding, since this was unexplored territory, it nevertheless proved to become very successful; I was able to investigate over 100 of the oldest and most influential Lun Yu translations, which resulted in my writings about the "shengren" -- a non-European archetype of wisdom found in Confucian cultures, comparable to that of the buddhas in Buddhist cultures.
In contrast to India Studies where plenty of Sanskrit/Hindu concepts were adopted into our European lexicon (like karma, dharma, Vedanta, Upanishads, nirvana, the list goes on), in China Studies Chinese concepts were deliberately translated into European vocabularies so as to prepare China for the coming of its Christianization. Even when that plan failed, those erroneous translations were never taken back. As a result, to this day, Germany for example still entertains Richard Wilhelm's idea of Confucius as a "Heiliger" or biblical saint. As to the English speaking world and the West in general: the shengren remains virtually unknown. [READ MORE]. [BACK TO MAIN].
