The Translator as Ferryman: Haiwang Yuan on Carrying Xuemo’s Thought Across Cultures | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 18)

The Translator as Ferryman: Haiwang Yuan on Carrying Xuemo’s Thought Across Cultures | “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” (Episode 18)

Translation is not merely a matter of finding words in one language to replace those in another, Haiwang Yuan told an international audience on July 19, 2026. It is an attempt to carry a way of life from one shore to another without losing what gives it meaning.

Yuan, a sinologist, translator, and Professor Emeritus at Western Kentucky University, was the principal guest at the eighteenth session of “Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars.” Organized by the World Literature Union and the Xuemo Foundation, the online forum was titled “Let the Heart Belong to You: How Xuemo’s Thought Transcends Language and Culture.”

Xuemo joined scholars and writers from China, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Nepal, and elsewhere, along with more than 200 readers. The discussion grew out of Yuan’s translation of Xuemo’s Let Your Heart Be Your Own and soon widened into a conversation about xin-xing (心性), the cultivation of the heart-mind and human nature.

Yanjin Chen, author of The Xuemo Code, moderated the event.

The Long Work of Carrying a Book Across Languages

Yuan has spent much of his career translating Chinese literature and introducing Chinese culture to readers abroad. He has also served as a visiting professor at Nankai University and Tianjin Foreign Studies University.

He recently completed Let Your Heart Be Your Own, a book that has remained popular in China for more than a decade. He is now at work on the four-volume Xuemo’s Lessons in Wisdom.

The hardest part of translating the earlier book, Yuan said, was not the language. It was finding English words for experiences that did not fit neatly within English categories.

The Chinese word xin, for example, may refer to feeling, reason, awareness, or wisdom. Depending on the context, it can mean both “heart” and “mind.” English offers no exact equivalent.

After considering several titles, Yuan settled on Let Your Heart Be Your Own.

“‘Heart’ in English tends to emphasize emotion,” he said. “But it can also suggest the inner core of a person. That comes closer to Xuemo’s idea of reclaiming sovereignty over one’s inner life.”

The phrase “yoga of the mind” presented another problem. Yuan worried that readers might associate yoga only with physical exercise. He chose “Mind Yoga” and used the translation to explain a broader practice: giving one’s full attention to an ordinary task and finding satisfaction in doing it well.

Translation itself gradually became such a practice for him. Yuan quoted a sentence from the book: “Do not cling, but keep working diligently.”

The line helped him through more than ten rounds of revision and through the hours he sometimes spent tracing a single word. A translator, he said, must know when further research is necessary and when perfection has become another form of attachment.

Matching terms is not enough. Something of the life behind those terms must also survive.

That is why Yuan thinks of the translator as a ferryman. The boat may be altered during the passage, but the book’s inner life must reach the other shore.

He imagined a reader who had never visited China finishing the book and asking, “Does my heart belong to me today?”

If that happened, Yuan said, the translation would have arrived.

What Is “Xin”?

Chen then asked Xuemo to define the idea at the center of the book. His answer also addressed the difficulty Yuan had faced in translating xin心.

Accounts of Chinese civilization, Xuemo said, tend to emphasize two forms of development. The first is material, reconstructed through archaeology and physical remains. The second is institutional, expressed through ritual, music, government, and law. Less attention has been paid to a third tradition: xin-xing cultivation.

“Even before Buddhism reached China, xin-xing cultivation was already highly developed in the pre-Qin period,” he said.

Xuemo referred to the “Sixteen-Character Teaching of the Mind” in the Book of Documents, Zhuangzi’s “The Great and Venerable Teacher,” and the teachings of Mencius.

In these traditions, the heart-mind is more than an abstract philosophical category. Xuemo regards it as one of the foundations of Chinese cultural identity. It directs the inner life while remaining closely connected to qi, the body’s vital energy. Together, he said, they give a person the capacity to act as a responsible subject rather than merely react to outside pressures.

Modern societies have achieved remarkable material and institutional development, but Xuemo sees little evidence that this progress has resolved their inward crises. War, ecological destruction, anxiety, depression, and lives increasingly shaped by algorithms and capital have made inner freedom more difficult and more necessary.

Under these conditions, “letting the heart belong to you” is not a subject for philosophical conversation alone. It becomes a practical question: Who, or what, is governing one’s life?

The “self” Xuemo has in mind is not the identity formed by social roles, family history, hormones, or the body’s microbiome. He means an awakened self capable of exercising genuine agency.

To illustrate the point, he invoked a popular story about Steve Jobs regretting near the end of his life that he had devoted himself to business rather than art. For Xuemo, the imagined Jobs who wanted to make art represented a self obscured by the public identity of commercial success.

This is the difference, he said, between “being yourself” and letting your heart belong to you. The first can remain caught in a struggle between self and world. The second requires a form of awakening that loosens the terms of that struggle.

Translation, Adaptation, and the Example of Japan

The conversation next turned to a problem familiar to every translator: How much can a work change before it ceases to be faithful?

Drawing on recent visits to Singapore and Hong Kong, Xuemo argued that cultural transmission should not be afraid of adaptation. Traditions survive because people find new ways to live with them, not because they remain untouched.

He pointed to Japan, where cultural practices inherited from China during the Tang and Song periods were adapted to different social conditions. Traditions such as Shingon Buddhism and the tea ceremony acquired distinctly Japanese forms and later became known around the world.

For Xuemo, adaptation may prolong a tradition rather than betray it.

He therefore gave Yuan considerable freedom. When asked whether a translator should be faithful primarily to the wording, the ideas, or the experience behind a book, he chose experience.

“I would rather sacrifice some of my language and artistry than leave English-language readers unable to understand,” Xuemo said.

Yuan was free to supply context, alter sentence structures, and explain references that would otherwise remain obscure. Xuemo compared this with the Buddha’s use of ordinary speech to teach people outside a learned elite.

Yuan described such decisions as an exercise of translator subjectivity. The phrase does not mean changing a book to suit personal preference. It means accepting that translators inevitably make judgments and using that freedom responsibly to recreate the conditions in which the work can be understood.

Who Retains Agency in the Age of AI?

Near the end of the forum, Chen asked what xin-xing cultivation might mean in the age of artificial intelligence.

Yuan’s answer began with translation. AI is useful for identifying obscure references, including unfamiliar names for ancient objects, and for searching large bodies of existing knowledge. But it cannot supply the originality or human warmth on which serious thought and literary translation depend.

Xuemo approached the question through Buddhist philosophy. AI, he said, is a conditioned phenomenon. Its responses emerge from algorithms, data, and prior relationships. It reacts, but it does not possess independent subjectivity.

The central concern of xin-xing, by contrast, is agency: the cultivation of an inner ground that is not wholly governed by external conditions.

“The more powerful AI becomes, the more important it is to let the heart belong to you,” Xuemo said.

He suggested that the idea of a person might eventually extend beyond the biological individual. Human beings may come to be understood through the worlds of relationship they create. Scholars, readers, technologies, and every consequential encounter would form part of those worlds.

A sincere conversation therefore does more than connect two individuals. It changes the world each person inhabits.

What Reaches the Other Shore

In his closing remarks, Yuan said that meeting Xuemo had felt strangely destined. Their shared interests in wine, tea, and tai chi had created an affinity that preceded their work together and was not dependent on language.

The conversation lasted more than two hours. It began with a translator explaining why one Chinese word had resisted English and ended with questions about human agency in a technological age.

Yuan’s ferryman remained the evening’s most useful image. A translation may alter syntax, supply context, or choose an imperfect word. Fidelity cannot mean leaving every sentence untouched. It means ensuring that something living reaches the reader.

“Xuemo in Dialogue with International Scholars” is held each Sunday at 8 p.m. Beijing time. The next session will continue the series’ discussion of literature, philosophy, and cultural exchange.