ABSTRACT
Xiong Shili is regarded as one of the most original and influential of China's twentieth-century philosophers. As a young intellectual he was witness to and participator in the turmoil that followed the Hundred Days Reform of 1898 and that culminated in the overthrow of the Ching dynasty and the founding, in 1911, of the Republic. He grew up302in a society that was in cultural ferment, in which Confucianism was waning and people were rapidly absorbing and exploring western influence while at the same experiencing the profound loss of traditions and values so long established that they had seemed part of the natural structure of the Chinese world. His philosophy has roots in the neo- Confucianism of Wang Yangming, 1 in the Consciousness-Only Buddhism 2 he studied as a young man, and in the Book of Changes (I Ching). 3 It also takes nourishment from the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the French philosopher who posited the idea of a vital force, élan vital, as the fundamental reality. Xiong, too, posited an original, immaterial substance which, like Bergson's élan vital, is in a constant flux of evolution.
