China & East Asia · 1885–1968
Xiong Shili
Founder of New Confucian metaphysics
Trained in Yogācāra, he broke with it: original reality (benti) and its functioning (yong) are not two, but one ceaselessly creative process grasped in the moral mind.
Life and thought
Xiong Shili, born in 1885 to a poor family in Huanggang, Hubei, joined the revolutionary army that brought down the Qing dynasty before turning to scholarship. In 1920 he went to study Yogācāra Buddhism under Ouyang Jingwu at the China Inner Learning Institute in Nanjing, and in 1922 Cai Yuanpei invited him to teach it at Peking University. His New Treatise on Consciousness-Only (1932) broke with his teacher’s school and provoked a fierce Buddhist rebuttal. He stayed in mainland China after 1949, wrote on despite growing isolation, and died in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution.
He rejected the Yogācāra picture of an unchanging true reality behind the changing world: substance and function are not two, and reality is ceaseless creative transformation, unfolding through contracting and expanding movements. His image is the ocean and its waves: the ocean is not something hidden behind the waves, it is the waves. This reality is known not by analytic reasoning but by the original mind, the moral intuition Confucians call humaneness, which made the Book of Changes, not Buddhism, his final authority. His students Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi and Xu Fuguan carried New Confucianism on.