Xuanzang

or Hsüan-tsang

(born 600, Guoshi, China—died 664, Chang'an) Chinese Buddhist monk and pilgrim to India. He received a classical Confucian education before converting to Buddhism. Troubled by discrepancies in the sacred texts, he left for India in 629 to study the religion at its source. He traveled by foot across Central Asia and reached India in 633. After study at the famous Nalanda monastery, he returned home in 645 to a hero's welcome, bringing back hundreds of Buddhist texts, including some of the most important Mahayana scriptures, and spent the rest of his life translating. Influenced by the Yogacara school, he established the Weishi (“Ideation Only”) school of Buddhism, which won many followers in Japan as the Hossō school. The classic novel Xiyou ji was inspired by his life.

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(born Feb. 18, 1951, Tainan county, Taiwan) President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2000 to 2008. Chen studied law at National Taiwan University and later became one of the island's leading attorneys. After unsuccessfully defending protesters who opposed the ruling Nationalist Party, he became linked with the opposition movement, and in the mid-1980s he was jailed on charges of libeling a Nationalist official. He subsequently joined the Democratic Progressive Party and became a prominent member of the movement to establish Taiwan's independence. He served in Taiwan's legislature (1989–94) before being elected mayor of Taipei in 1994. Although he did not win reelection in 1998, the loss freed him to run for president in 2000, and he defeated the Nationalist Party's candidate, ending that party's 55-year rule of Taiwan. In 2004 Chen was narrowly reelected, the vote coming one day after he and his running mate, Vice President Annette Lu (Lu Hsiu-lien), were shot and slightly wounded while campaigning in Tainan. Chen's second term was marred by corruption scandals.

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or Ch'en Tu-hsiu

(born Oct. 8, 1879, Huaining county, Anhuei province, China—died May 27, 1942, Jiangjing, near Chongqing) Chinese political and intellectual leader, a founder of the Chinese Communist Party. As a young man, Chen studied in Japan. In China, he started subversive periodicals that were quickly suppressed by the government. In 1915, after the establishment of the Chinese republic, he created the monthly Qingnian zazhi (“Youth Magazine”), renamed Xin qingnian (“New Youth”), in which he proposed that the youth of China rejuvenate the nation intellectually and culturally; Lu Xun, Hu Shih, and Mao Zedong were all contributors. In 1917 Chen was appointed dean of the School of Letters at Beijing University. In 1919 he was imprisoned briefly for his role in the May Fourth Movement; on his release he became a Marxist. With Li Dazhao, Mao, and others, he founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1920/21. The Communist International had him removed as party leader when the party's alliance with the Nationalist Party fell apart, and he was expelled from the party in 1929. Arrested in 1932, he spent five years in prison.

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"Schwächen" [Weaknesses] (Bert Brecht), is a work by Juan Maria Solare for any voice and any melodic instrument. It was composed in Cologne, Germany in November 1993, and lasts two minutes. It was first performed in two versions: by Ligia Liberatori (soprano) and Ulrich Krieger (tenor saxophone), and by Richard Mix (bass) and Ulrich Krieger during the Vacation Courses of New Music in Darmstadt, Germany, on 3 August, 1994.