Life 生平
Xu Dishan (許地山, 1893–1941), who wrote under the pen name 落花生 (Luo Huasheng, 'Fallen Peanut'), was a scholar of comparative religion as well as a writer, and one of the first modern Chinese authors to bring Buddhist and Christian ideas into short vernacular prose rather than treating them as separate scholarly subjects. That double background gives his writing its distinctive texture: parables, sketches and aphorisms that read closer to devotional literature than to the more combative fiction of his contemporaries.
His best-known piece, the short essay 落花生 (The Peanut), uses a humble peanut patch to teach the quiet value of usefulness over showy achievement, and has been reprinted in Chinese schoolbooks for decades — lending both his pen name and his gentlest work their most lasting image. His prose is plain and unhurried, built for slow reading, one or two short pieces at a sitting, and consistently drawn to suffering, patience and faith rather than to plot or spectacle.
Alongside his writing he worked as an educator and scholar, and he was active in Hong Kong's wartime cultural resistance against Japan before dying suddenly of a heart attack there in 1941, in the middle of that work.
Works 作品
Legacy 遺產
Almost every literate Chinese adult has read Xu Dishan, whether or not they know it: 落花生 has sat in primary-school readers for so long that its lesson about being useful rather than showy is closer to a proverb than to an essay. That fame is also a trap, since it leaves the rest of his work — the parables, the religious sketches, the stories of women enduring — much less read than the four hundred characters about a peanut patch.
His other legacy is institutional. As head of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong from 1935 he dragged a conservative classical curriculum toward the modern vernacular and toward the study of religion and folklore, and his early scholarly work on Chinese and Indian religious texts is still cited. For a learner his prose is the calmest in this collection: short, unhurried pieces that reward slow reading rather than punishing it.