Alexander von Staël-Holstein

Alexander von Staël-Holstein (born January 1, 1877 in Testama , Livonia Governorate , † March 16, 1937 in Beijing , Republic of China ) was an Estonian Orientalist , Indologist , Sinologist and East Asian scholar .

Life

Staël-Holstein came from a German-Swedish-Baltic noble family of Westphalian origin ( Staël von Holstein ) and was related to the husband of the French writer Madame de Staël . He grew up in his Baltic homeland speaking German and French, on his parents' estate in Testama , which he inherited around 1900, and is still in good condition today .

After attending grammar school in Pernau and studying philology in Dorpat , he went to Germany to study oriental studies. After studying for three years at the University of Berlin (at that time the participation in a duel is on record with the Prussian authorities), he completed his dissertation at the University of Halle with Richard Pischel , which he completed in 1900. At the time, Pischel was the world's leading expert on Prakrit , the original form of Indian Sanskrit . The subject of the dissertation was the translation of the second part of the Karmapradipa , a Vedic sutra. The first part had also been translated by Pischel in 1889 as part of a dissertation by Friedrich Schrader .

After completing his doctorate, Staël-Holstein traveled through Europe and India and studied with various prominent orientalists and Indologists. In 1909 he received a call to the University of Saint Petersburg for an assistant professorship in the exploration of the Central and East Asian regions of Russia. At the same time he became a member of the Academic Committee for the Study of Central Asia and the Far East (ACECAFE). In 1912 he went to Harvard University to study Sanskrit.

When the October Revolution broke out in 1917, Staël-Holstein was in Beijing (China). Although the new Estonian government partially expropriated him as part of the Estonian land reform in 1919, he took on Estonian citizenship. However, he spent the rest of his life in Beijing.

In 1922 Staël-Holstein was offered a professorship for Sanskrit, Tibetan and Indian religious history at Peking University . In 1927 he was a founding member of the Sino-Indian Institute in Beijing, followed by another study visit to Harvard in 1928.

Services

Staël-Holstein wrote important publications on the Indian and Tibetan religions, in addition he dealt intensively with the phonetics of Sanskrit and Chinese.

Works

• The Kāçyapaparivarta: a Mahāyānasūtra of the Ratnakūṭa class, edited in the original Sanskrit, in Tibetan and in Chinese, Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1926
• On a Tibetan text translated into Sanskrit under Ch'ien Lung (XIII cent.) And into Chinese under Tao Kuang (XIX cent.), Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping , 1932
• On two Tibetan pictures representing some of the spiritual ancestors of the Dalai Lama and of the Panchen Lama, Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping, 1932
• A commentary to the Kāçcyapaparivarta, edited in Tibetan and in Chinese, Peking: published jointly by the National Library and the National Tsinghau University, 1933
• On a Peking edition of the Tibetan kanjur which seems to be unknown in the West, Peking: Lazarist Press, 1934
• On two recent reconstructions of a Sanskrit hymn transliterated with Chinese characters in the X century AD, Peking: Lazarist Press, 1934
• Two Lamaistic pantheons, edited with introduction and indexes by Walter Eugene Clark from materials collected by the late Baron A. von Staël-Holstein, Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series 3 and 4, Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press, 1937

Literature / source

• Serge Elisseeff: Stael-Holstein's Contribution to Asiatic Studies. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Apr., 1938), pp. 1–8 (available through JSTOR)