Introduction

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      This site presents essays on the life and thought of Xiong Shili (熊十力 1885-1968)taken primarily from my PhD thesis submitted in 1978 to the Australian National University in Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory, Australia. Xiong’s life and thought has three major periods: the early years that formed his knowledge of and devotion to Confucianism, as well as a fervent patriotism that saw him refuse on principle to take the imperial examinations but instead join the Republican Revolutionaries to overthrow the Qing dynasty and end China’s two thousand years of imperial rule. By passing the examination for the Army Special School, Xiong took on the dangerous task of clandestine liaison between the Revolutionaries and the imperial troops, a crucial but dangerous revolutionary role that few educated men of the era had the ability to perform. Two boyhood friends who joined the Revolution with Xiong, lost their lives advancing the Revolutionary cause. Xiong several times came close to losing his life and a large bounty placed on his head by the Qing court forced him into hiding. 

     After the 1911 Republican Revolution, Xiong started on the second major period of his life when Xiong studied Buddhism at the China Institute for Inner Learning in Nanjing. Under the guidance of Ouyang Jingwu, the Institute’s Director, Xiong became a noted expert on Buddhism in general and Yogacara Buddhism in particular. Over time, Xiong saw serious philosophical flaws in the Yogacara philosophy and wrote a critique of Yogacara titled New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness. This critique became Xiong’s magnum opus and a major work of 20th century philosophy. [1]

     During the third period of Xiong’s life, Xiong taught in the Philosophy Department of Beijing University, then China’s leading university, where Xiong published several philosophical works of note and played a leading role in the university’s intellectual life. Xiong became a well-known public intellectual engaging, for example, in the 1923 debate on science and metaphysics in support of the metaphysicians. Xiong’s vast correspondence with students, teachers, and noted intellectuals is a vast treasure of philosophical rumination and a strong defense of traditional Chinese Culture. As Xu Fuguan, one of Xiong’s students and an important intellectual in his own right, put it: Xiong was a living Great Wall that protected traditional Chinese culture. Xiong’s relative obscurity outside the Chinese speaking world masks his importance as a 20th-century philosopher, teacher, and intellectual.

     I first learned of Xiong and his works  while auditing classes at National Taiwan University in the 1970’s. Many  students on campus carried a copy of Xiong’s 1956 work Original Confucianism (原儒) in the distinctive edition produced by the Student Bookstore located across from NTU’s front gate. The Student Bookstore had published an edition of Xiong’s book produced from an original copy provided by Prof. Tang Junyi, a former student of Xiong’s who was then a Professor at New Asia College in Hong Kong and who visited Taiwan and lectured at NTU. Prof. Tang’s original copy had been sent to him in Hong Kong from China by Xiong’s daughter, Xiong Youguang (熊幼光). This was the manner in which the Taipei Student Bookstore received and published other copies of Xiong’s later works, such as Treatise on Substance and Function (體用論）published by the Longmen Bookstore in Shanghai in 1957 but limited to  two hundred copies. The Student Bookstore received one of those copies from  Prof. Tang Junyi and reprinted Xiong’s treatise in 1976. 

     In 1975, this author provided Taipei’s Student Bookstore with a photocopy of Xiong’s The Development of Qian and Kun（乾坤衍） first published on the mainland in  1961. To aid me in PhD thesis research, the Fung Ping Shan Library at Hong  Kong University provided me with a photocopy of an original copy provided to  the library, according to Wing-tsit Chan (1901-1994), by one of Xiong’s former  students who “smuggled the work from the mainland”.[2] That copy had no publisher’s name and Chan thought that it was probably  privately printed on the mainland. The Student Bookstore published the work in  Taipei in 1976. 

In thinking about Xiong Shili and his philosophical works, I’m reminded of a question that the great Chinese Indologist and Linguist Ji Xianlin (季羨林 1911-2009) put forth in an essay memorializing Xiong’s Beijing University Philosophy Department Chairman and colleague, the scholar Tang Yongtong (湯用彤 1893-1964). Ji’s question is: “Can a Great Academic Master be surpassed? "(學術大師能不能超越？) Ji’s answer is no. Just as a great mountain peak is one of a kind, so also Great Academic Masters are one of a kind and, while future Great Masters will arise, the work of previous Great Academic Masters remains unique. I respectfully suggest that Xiong Shili deserves that accolade of Great Academic Master. 

                                             A Note on Citing Xiong’s Sources

The primary source used for Xiong’s works is: The Collected Books of Xiong Shili (十力叢書), Shanghai, Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House (上海書店出版社), 2008; Chinese Edition; Kindle Edition. The Collected Books consists of fifteen volumes containing eighteen works and are cited as follows: CB (for Collected Books), the volume number in Roman numerals, followed by the title of the work (e.g. The Essential Sayings of Xiong Shili (十力語要) in abbreviated form Essential Sayings), followed by the juan (卷) number and page(s) number(s) in Arabic numerals. Thus, a citation from Xiong’s Essential Sayings would read: CB, XV, Essential Sayings, juan 2, pp. 27-28. Citations from other works in the Collected Books are cited using the above format.

[1] Cf. John Makeham’s 2015 translation titled New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness, Yale University Press, New Haven & London.

[2] See Chan’s Religious Trends in Modern China, Columbia University Press, 1953.