Writer: Cheng Zhihua

Publisher: People’s Publishing House

In 1932, his A New Treatise on Consciousness-only, Xiong Shili presents a Confucian critique of Buddhism based on The Book of Changes. The content he refer­ences is at times quite obscure, making parts of the vast system he introduces inaccessible to the lay reader. Cheng Zhihua’s shift from the philosophy of Mou Zongsan (another 20th-century Confucian exponent) and re­cent publication of Xiong Shili’s Philosophy—The Theoretical System of a New Treatise on Con­sciousness-only therefore comes as a welcome guide to Xiong’s thought.

Historically, Chinese philoso­phers and historians of Chinese philosophy have typically had clear methods for discussing consciousness. Cheng Zhihua makes a distinction between ex­ternal interpretation of a theory, which emphasizes the relation­ship between philosophy and the historical conditions from which it emerges, and internal interpre­tation, which isolates the objects from their historical background or social influences and places them wholly within their ideo­logical framework. In the Xiong Shili’s Philosophy, Cheng com­pares these interpretive methods in great detail, stressing the importance of the latter method. According to his explanation, external changes in philosophical discourse really arise from inter­nal causes.

Cheng concludes that from Xiong Shili’s perspective, phi­losophy has three characteristics. Firstly, philosophy is, at its core, ontology—ancient philosophy in particular is simply ontology and the study of forms. Secondly, philosophy presents a set of cat­egories and a conceptual system, without which its articulators would be unable to formulate their ideas clearly and precisely. Thirdly, philosophy has a logical framework. This is a precondi­tion for its communicability and forms the mode of expression by which philosophers elaborate their thought.

Cheng Zhihua is from the School of Chinese Classics at Wuhan Uni­versity.

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 561, Feb. 19, 2014

                                                   Translated by Zhang Mengying

                                                    Revised by Charles Horne