The only time a scientist of Romanian origin was recognized in Asiatique magazine – the oldest periodical of Asian studies in Europe, published continuously since 1822 – was launched after the death of the Indian scholar Arion Rose through the obituary of the French academic Pierre-Sylvain Fillioz. Arion Rosu was born in Bucharest on February 1, a century ago. preparation I Indological opera, 1956-2007 under the Institute of the History of Religions, a comprehensive restitative edition that will include more than 180 studies, articles and reviews published by him on three continents and intended for three large volumes, I am grateful to the editors Contributors | HotNews for the opportunity to remind a wider audience who was the Red Arion (adopting the text that first appeared in French in Paris and in English in Wiesbaden, in Indian periodicals, here and here), now, in the centenary. He was and remains an unsurpassed master. I remain in an unspeakable debt to Regula Mihai, the one who in 2006 in Elizabeth’s palace, making me not know how to tell about the previous episode described below, listened attentively, smiled and urged me to convey all my thoughts: good luck to my master. I thank Gabriele Corsard for the phone call in Montreal that helped Arion Rosa find – in his old age, in 2003 – a friend of his teenage years: Marcel Leibovitch. I thank Bohdan Tetar-Kazaban for an impeccable intuition formulated at a pedestrian crossing sometime in 2005, which in the end brought great joy to Bucharest and the Franco-Romania of Arion Roche. The same goes for my friend David Lieberson, who once out of the blue took on translating it into Romanian with the fervor of a Sanskritist. To Sanskritologist Vlad Shoverel, with whom we are friends and support their legendary friendship, to Sergiu Al-George and Arion Ros. I also have the most vivid memories of his wife, Claude Rose, who also died in 2007, and of Miriam Jacob-Rocha, to whom he wanted to show the city and country where he came from for the last time. here in 2001. In the karst wasteland through which plagiarism, theft, and the abomination of education and culture often cloud the atmosphere today, it may not be entirely and utterly useless to remind ourselves what the researcher—no: the scientist—had in mind, and by what measure we must really weigh.

With the death of Arion Thomas Rose on the morning of April 4, 2007, in a hospital in Versailles, French and international Indologists parted ways with one of the rarest and most valuable scientists. The Nestor (at that time) of Romanian orientalists, Arion Roshu devoted the main part of his life to the study of Indian medicine, and his work has all the necessary features to be considered one of the most formidable and significant of the era in which Ayurveda received an important right in Indian studies. citizenship

Little Arion was born in Bucharest on February 1, 1924, and lived his early years in Sinaia, a small town at the foot of the Prahov Carpathians, founded around 1700 around the monastery of the same name and reminiscent of a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai. climber Mykhailo Kantakuzyn. After 1883, when Charles I and Queen Elizabeth – among other correspondents of Max Müller – inaugurated Peles Castle as the summer residence of the royal family, Sinaia became an attractive city. Later, Arion Roche will not forget how, playing around, he saw an older, handsome boy, whom he learned was Mihai I (b. 1921), the last king (1940-1947) of Romania, who, scarred by countless convulsions, will forever be remembered his teenage and student years.

Not far from the other ancient founders of Cantacuz, his modest family will move to the capital of the Kingdom of Great Romania in 1931, and here Arion will resume school courses, whose course is shaken by economic instability, serious uncertainty caused by local political activity. situation and soon about the onset of war. Witness and victim of racial and ideological persecution, dictatorships that will follow one after the other in Romania until the end of 1989, he will be protected at first only by the exemplary solidarity of the family, rare scholarships of some poor private institutions. and, at the threshold and during the war, in full intellectual formation, through vivid friendships with Jewish and Catholic co-religionists, attracted by the world of India and the civilization of Asia. Thus, he will remember the whole life of teenagers of the past, Anton Zygmund-Serba (1923-1964), Lisa Zygmund-Serba (1924-1965), Marcel Leibovich (1924-2005), Anton, Marcel and Arion, who were part of the same class – under threat numerus clausus – and sharing the passion of the same rare, difficult reading. However, their paths will diverge, unlike Arion Rose, who will manage to emigrate to France already in 1947, where they will follow a steady orientalist path, especially at the École Pratique de Hautes Études and the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, finding – later they became professors of history of Asian religions at Columbia University (Anton Sigmund-Serbu) or Assyriology at the University of Montreal (Marcel Leibovichi). However, his belonging to the first generation of Romanian Orientalists, to which is added another great friend, Sergiu Al-George (1922-1981), will forever bind him. As Arion Roza wrote about the Serbian couple, “ils se partagerent, pour ainsi dire, l’Orient, d’une part l’Asie orientale, de l’autre l’Asie antérieure, qui englobait l’Orient chrétien auquel était rattachée Eastern Europe “.

Arion Rose’s deep vocation for the study of India, which appeared very early, was unmatched, just as nothing could defeat his desire to devote himself to it, also relying on his solid training in classical philology, convincingly illustrated at the time by the University of Bucharest . Like his colleagues, he was able to enjoy in his early youth the existence in Bucharest of an Indian scholar and historian of religions who would become famous everywhere: Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Motivated by his insistence on the study of India, Arion Rozu would discover, assimilate and continue his doctoral thesis on yoga, which was conducted in Bucharest in 1933 and published in 1936 (yoga Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne, Bucharest, Royal Foundations – Paris, Paul Geuthner Orientalist Bookstore). Nowhere else is Arion Roche’s journey expressed so deeply and personally – between the “cet indianisme sans école” that was and will remain to this day Romanian and the incomparable French and European Indianism – as he finds in an unpublished article he dedicated to “Professor Mircea Eliade to his 70th birthday”:

“Les premiers travaux d’indianisme de Mircea Eliade, notamente sa this sur le.” Yoga, prepared in India under the direction of S. N. Dasgupta, aroused lively interest in Bucharest and kindled among young classical philologists like Sigmund-Cherbu and myself the flame of Sanskrit and Indian thought. La direction féconde de son analysis des techniques corporelles et spiritualles du Yoga est rejointe par mes travaux philologique entrepris à Paris depuis 1965 sur la médicine indienne traditionalelle, especially sur la psychosomatic de l’Āyurveda. Attiré dans les années 1940 par l’orientalisme sous l’impulse des recherches de Mircea Eliade, don’t je n’ai la connaissance qu un quart de siècle plus tard en Occident, the long detour has ramené en fait à son inspiration. Ma rencontre, attendue quatre lustres, avec les maîtres français en indianisme a en effet reconduit en quelque sorte au point de départ, à savoir l’analyse givenne par Mircea Eliade des pratiques psychosomatiques du Yoga. C’est elle qui a été determininge pour ma démarche intellectuelle. As in the Hasidic legend interpreted by Heinrich Zimmer, where the pious rabbi of Cracow had to make a journey to Prague to finally discover his own treasure hidden behind the stove of his home, so I personally had to make a long journey to Prague for initiation. pouvoir retrouver l’idée qui m’avait poussé, encore collégien à Bucharest, à me consecracer aux études sanscrites. D’autre part, j’ai renoué avec la tradition savante de mon devancier Constantin Georgian. Il ya un siècle celui ci avait en effet été auditor de la conférence de sanskrit que donnait Abel Bergaigne à l’École des Hautes Études, et ce genial védisant a marked la destinée de Sylvain Lévi, le maître de mes maîtres, Louis Renou et Jean Filiozat” (manuscript from the 1970s handed over by the author; second edition, pp. 4-5).

Arion Roche’s work includes nearly a century of monographs, articles, bibliographies, and more than sixty critical reviews, notes, and bibliographic notes. A study on “La musicothérapie en perspective historique et transculturelle”, written in recent years, should begin as follows: “Tout arrive pour celui qui sait attendre”. Red Arion knew well what it meant to wait. Steeped in French culture and stimulated by the existence of the Institut Français in Bucharest, then directed by Alphonse Dupron (the future rector of the Sorbonne) or the French Lycée Bossuet, he tried from the outset to get close to the respected names he supervised. throughout the work. Thus, he entered the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the late 1940s, but he actually had to wait twenty years to integrate into the Parisian Indian milieu.

Arion Roseux made his debut in 1956 with an article on various “disciple names in Sanskrit”, published in French in Berlin. The date should not be misleading: it rather reflects the more than unstable conditions that stifled any humanistic research in the unfree Europe of those years. But Professor Dr. Raghu Vira, then director of the International Academy of Indian Culture (New Delhi), wrote to him on June 10, 1958, before arriving in Bucharest: “You have devoted your time and energy to the study of India. and that makes you a bridge between India and Romania.” Together with his good friend and colleague Al-George (with whom he maintained a long, painful correspondence), he builds his thorough philological and historical education in conditions of isolation, precariousness and risk, about which history is difficult, but prefers a calm memory, as he did it with his daughter Miriam in 2001, when he was last in Romania.

An encounter with the school of Louis Renaud (whom he had worshiped since adolescence) and especially Jean Fillios, his adoption in the library of the Guimet Museum (1965-1967), and later in National Center of Sciences (1967-1990), allowed him to realize his vocation. His appreciation and affection for France, its language and culture were always unsurpassed. In the extremely solid and varied work and in the humanistic personality of Jean Fillios, Arion Rose finds, directly or indirectly, the most valuable stimulus, even if the discovery of the works of the Saxon doctor Ranjit Singh Honigberger or the books of Rheingold F.G. Müller already in the 1950s attracted precisely to the traditional medicine of South Asia. Under the supervision of his master, he synthesizes the classic thesis, defended in 1974 and published in 1978 – Psychological Concepts in Indian Medical Texts – all issues and literature of ancient and medieval India, related to psychosomatic unity, continuous rereading and rewriting, with extraordinary density and brevity (“I know you well, you are a passionate “perfectionist”, Eliade will write to him on September 29, 1977) . Fundamental issues in Indian medical thought have not been studied with greater precision and acuteness since 1978 until today, and this may be reaffirmed in 2024. Many studies from 1970-2000 would deepen the trajectory of a student who became a master in the canton of classical medicine. For a long time, Indo studies was too little attended and considered as a humanistic priority. The consistency and rigor of all his research unites several volumes, in which, summarized in the form Kleine Schriften, could easily expand the subject and method of lifelong, innovative and serious research, and this is what Arion Rozu has been thinking about in recent years. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro