The missionary methods of the Jesuits all over the world were based on the learning of the local language, adaptation to the culture, and indirect mission. In this context, the mission to the Chinese people constituted a special and great challenge. Therefore, the Jesuits also used the apostolate through books. Several hundred scientific texts and religious/moral texts were published in the Chinese language by Chinese Christians and Western missionaries. These texts, often based on European models, but adapted to Chinese culture and language, have become an important field of research of Chinese and Western scholars during the last thirty years. The present book is such an enterprise, bringing together the Chinese original text with an annotated English translation with annotations, the Xingxue cushu 性學觕述 or Brief Introduction to the Study of Human Nature, done by the Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni (1582–1649).

Giulio Aleni, who came from Brescia, belonged to the second generation of Jesuit missionaries in China after Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Besides Aleni's standard Jesuit education in philosophy and theology, Aleni also studied mathematics and astronomy. In 1609 he stayed in Lisbon for several months before he departed to China under the Portuguese Padroado. In that time, it seems he received lessons at the Jesuit College in Coimbra, Portugal, which focused on the Aristotelian philosophy that became important in the China mission during the first half of the seventeenth century. After his arrival in China in 1611, Aleni worked with others in the province of Fujian, where he founded the mission in Fuzhou. His kind and open-minded character, his depth of knowledge, and his ability in the Chinese language gained him a high reputation among the Chinese. He was sometimes called “Confucius from the West.”

Aleni's well-documented conversations and dialogues about religion and philosophy with Chinese scholars in Fuzhou were famous at the time. The concepts of the human soul and nature in the East and West were particularly important subjects. The question of the rational soul contrasted against Buddhist ideas of metempsychosis, also called reincarnation, had already been raised in the Japan mission. The question was further discussed in the China mission, where its pioneer Matteo Ricci created the new Chinese term linghun 靈魂 as name for the rational soul. Later missionaries continued the discussions with treatises about the subject, though some of them, such as Niccolò Longobardo, SJ (1559–1654), or Francesco Sambiasi, SJ (1582–1649), doubted that the Chinese were able to understand the idea of Christian rational soul or Christian spiritual concepts.

Like most books written by Jesuits in China, Aleni's booklet was more than just a Chinese translation of the European text. The text of the Xingxue cushu used the philosophical course of the Jesuit College in Coimbra, the two-volume Cursus Conimbricensis, specifically the De Anima and Parva Naturalia, as a base. Philosophical Western ideas about the human nature and soul in combination with a Christian theology were intended to prove the immortality of the soul against the Buddhist concept of the metempsychosis, at least as the missionaries saw it. Aleni transformed and translated the Aristotelian model of the three souls—vegetative (plants), sensitive (animals), intellectual (human beings)—by using expressions and ideas borrowed from Confucianism to make it more comprehensible to a Chinese audience. He also added ideas about the body and medical explanations. The second juan (chapter) of the eight juan of the Chinese text provides Aleni's proofs for the immortality of the soul.

The present book presents the Chinese text written in the form of a dialogue with the English translation (62–367). The translators and editors Thierry Meynard and Dawei Pan added exhaustive and useful annotations. Mário S. de Carvalho, an expert on the Cursus Conimbricensis, contributed a foreword about the background of the Latin Urtext of Coimbra. This foreword is followed by an exhaustive introduction to the text by Meynard and Pan.

This book will be useful for sinologists, missiologists, theologians, historians, and anyone interested in the general subject. It presents a bridge in the exchange of ideas between two different cultures during early modern times. It is written on a high scientific level and may well help form the foundation for a further understanding of the history between East and West.