Xiong Shili

Works

• 1932New Treatise on Consciousness-Only (Xin weishi lun)

  A break with Yogacara: reality is not split into seeds and suchness but one creative process of closing and opening.

Position

Xiong took from Yogacara the question of how consciousness constitutes the world but rejected its answer. Yogacara, as taught in China after Xuanzang, distinguished the seeds in the storehouse consciousness from an unchanging suchness, and so, in his view, divided reality in two. For Xiong reality (ti, “substance”) and its functioning (yong) are not two: reality exists only as ceaseless creative change, as the ocean exists only in its waves. This change has two tendencies: “closing” (xi), which condenses into material things, and “opening” (pi), which manifests as mind and keeps the process free and directed. He found this view in the Book of Changes and in the Confucian tradition, especially in Wang Yangming’s teaching that the mind itself is principle. Buddhism, he argued, aims at extinction and withdrawal from the world, while Confucian learning is one of “daily renewal” in which the original mind, distinct from the habituated mind of desire and calculation, is to be realised in moral life. Xiong’s students Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan carried his project into Hong Kong and Taiwan, where they became the core of modern New Confucianism. Buddhist critics then and since have argued that he misread Yogacara, and his late attempts to read Confucius as a forerunner of socialism are generally seen as products of political pressure.

Life & context

Xiong Shili was born in 1885 in Huanggang in Hubei province into a poor family; his father, a village teacher, died when he was about ten, and he worked as a cowherd and had little formal schooling. As a young man he joined the revolutionary movement and took part in the revolution of 1911 that ended the Qing dynasty. Disappointed with politics, he turned to learning. In 1920 he began to study Yogacara Buddhism under Ouyang Jingwu at the China Institute of Inner Learning in Nanjing. In 1922 Cai Yuanpei, on the recommendation of Liang Shuming, invited him to teach Buddhist philosophy at Peking University. There he moved away from Yogacara and published his New Treatise on Consciousness-Only in classical Chinese in 1932; a largely rewritten vernacular version followed in 1944. Ouyang’s circle attacked the book as a betrayal of Buddhism, and Xiong answered with polemics of his own. After 1949 he stayed on the mainland and tried to reconcile Confucianism with the new order. At the start of the Cultural Revolution he was abused and humiliated; he died in Shanghai in 1968.

Further main works

• The Origins of Confucianism (Yuan ru, 1956)
• On Substance and Function (Ti yong lun, 1958)
• On Illuminating the Mind (Ming xin pian, 1959)