Xiong Shili (Chinese: 熊十力; pinyin: Xióng Shílì; Wade–Giles: Hsiung Shih-li, 1885 – May 23, 1968) was a Chinese essayist and philosopher whose major work A New Treatise on Vijñaptimātra (新唯識論, Xin Weishi Lun) is a Confucian critique of the Buddhist Vijñapti-mātra "consciousness-only" theory popularized in China by the Tang-dynasty pilgrim Xuanzang.
[1]: 127 He felt that national survival was predicated on a sense of community, which in turn could only come from trusting commitments from the people involved.
[2]: 248 While he led a fairly secluded life throughout his career as a teacher and his association with the academic community did not begin until he was in his late thirties, his views have influenced scholars to this day.
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 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.
Xiong felt that his mission was to assist China in overcoming its social and cultural crisis, and simultaneously to search for truth.
In his outline of the main point of the New Treatise he wrote (in reply to Mou Zongsan): Now again we are in a weak and dangerous situation.
[1]: 129 After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Xiong stayed on the mainland and continued to lecture at Peking University.
[1]: 129 Xiong's preference of Confucianism is partially because he felt that Buddhism overemphasizes the negative or passive aspects of human nature.
He labels Buddhism a learning of ‘daily decrease,’ a philosophy that points out the darker aspects of human nature and then directs us to eliminate it.
Xiong felt that the human dao lies in expanding the good root of the original mind and having it grow daily.
[1]: 130–31 Xiong felt that the central theory of his New Treatise was to show that original reality, (what he also refers to as ti 體 and substance), and the material world, (which he calls yong 用, or function.
The first sentences of the New Doctrine state that "the original reality of all things is neither the objective world separate from the mind, nor that is comprehensible through knowledge; it must be comprehended through reflective seeking and confirming".
Additionally, it uses "calculative understanding", which is a method of thinking that is deliberative and logical, bound to scientific rationality and sense experience.
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.
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.