Xiong Shili

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Xiong Shili : biography

1885 – May 23, 1968

This has two important implications, one, that the human mind and original reality are not separate; and two, original reality must be grasped through reflection on what is in the human mind. Because original reality and the human mind are not separate, this means that in order to know reality, you must first get to know your own mind. This is the cultivation of virtue.

Habituated Mind and Original Mind

For Xiong Shili, the human mind is distinguished by the habituated mind and the original mind. The habituated mind is the mind of thought, emotions, and the will. It is inclined to see the world as external to the self and is motivated by self-desires. Additionally, it uses ‘calculative understanding,’ which is a method of thinking that is deliberative and logical, bound to scientific rationality and sense experience. In contrast, the original mind is our real nature, at one with reality. It uses ‘nature understanding,’ which is an inward process of intuitive experiencing that points back to the mind itself to discover the original reality within it. Xiong speaks of calculative understanding as fit for seeking reason in the external world, the physical world. He states that we must use it carefully, and if we take original reality as an external object to infer and inquire into, then it is fundamentally wrong. He says that original reality can be comprehended, differing from Kant on this point. He stated that we must realize that original reality is in each one of us, and that we cannot seek to know it in external things. We must turn inward and allow original reality to present itself.

Yu, Jiyuan, "Xiong Shili's Metaphysics of Virtue." in Cheng, Zhongying, and Nicholas Bunnin, eds., Contemporary Chinese Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Print. pp. 139-140 

Biography

Xiong was born to a poverty-stricken family in the Huanggang, Hubei. His father was a village teacher who died of tuberculosis when Xiong was ten years old, forcing him to work as a cowherd for his neighbor to support his family. By his twenties, he was a dedicated revolutionary in the Republican Revolution that ended the Qing Dynasty and ushered in China’s first republic. Disgusted over corruption in politics, and what he termed "latent feudalism" among the revolutionaries, he began to study Buddhism in 1920 at the China Institute for Inner Learning (支那內學院) in Nanjing headed by Ouyang Jingwu (欧阳境无), perhaps the most influential lay Buddhist thinker of the twentieth century. At this time, the Chancellor of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei, sent Liang Shuming (梁漱溟, 1893-1988) to Nanjing to ask Ouyang Jingwu to recommend one of his students to teach Buddhist Logic (因明學, Yinming Xue) and Yogacara philosophy (唯识论) in the Philosophy Department at Peking University. Ouyang Jingwu recommended Xiong and passed Liang Shuming a draft on which Xiong had been working entitled An Outline of Consciousness-only. Impressed with Xiong’s work, Cai Yuanpei, on Liang’s recommendation, invited Xiong to Peking University where Xiong, much to the chagrin of Liang Shuming, destroyed his draft and instead wrote and published in 1932 what is now considered his major work A New Treatise on Consciousness-only (新唯识论, xin weishi lun). In his New Treatise, Xiong criticized the old Yogacara masters, such as the brothers Vasubandhu and Asanga (4 c.), as well as their successors, Dharmapala (530-561) and Xuanzang (c. 602–664), for their theory of seeds in which seeds, stored in the eight or ‘storehouse’ consciousness (alayavijnana), become discrete causal agents that ‘perfume’ (bring into being) all mental and physical dharmas. However, he also used the insights of Buddhism to reconstruct Confucianism. Much of his philosophy is influenced both by Buddhism and by his study of the Book of Changes, which he regarded as the fundamental classic of Confucianism.

Xiong felt that his mission was to assist China in overcoming its social and cultural crisis, and simultaneously to search for truth. He felt compelled to find and develop the dao of Confucius to meet the force of Western culture. In his outline of the main point of the New Treatise he wrote (in reply to Mou Zongsan):