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New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness. By Xiong Shili, an Annotated Translation by John Makeham. World Thought in Translation series. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. lxviii + 341. Hardcover $85.00, isbn 978-0- 300-19157-8.
New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness is an annotated translation by John Makeham of Xiong Shili's (1885-1968) major philosophical work Xin weishi lun ..., one of the most difficult and least understood of the crucial Chinese theoretical works of the twentieth century. In this work Xiong has integrated central concepts, problems, and themes from traditional Chinese philosophy with those representative of Sinitic Buddhist philosophy in order to create an ambitious philosophical syncretism. On the one hand, the book is a modern Confucian critique of the Buddhist theory of consciousness introduced to China by the pilgrim Xuanzang in the Tang dynasty. Xiong criticizes the original Yogacara pioneers of this theory, for instance the brothers Vasubandhu and Asanga as well as their numerous successors. In this critical context, the book is mainly directed against their theory of "seeds" (bija ...), which was originally only a heuristic metaphor. In the works of the Yogacara thinkers, however, the seeds were seen as a sort of atom forming the ontological basis of everything. According to this view, they are stored in the eight levels of consciousness (alayavijñana), in which they become discrete causal agents that bring into being all mental and physical dharmas. Xiong believes that with this reinterpretation of the term "seeds," the Yogacara thinkers effectively substantialized their position and, consequently, also the earlier Buddhist theories on consciousness as such.
On the other hand, however, Xiong has also applied Buddhist philosophical insights to reconstructing Confucianism, considering the fact that his theory is influenced both by Buddhism and by his own interpretations of the Book of Changes, which he regarded as one of the most important and basic Confucian classics. Both approaches have inspired Xiong to develop his own systematic philosophy, consisting of ontology (jing lun ...) and epistemology (liang lun ...), although the latter is not included in the present book. (Xiong has written only a rough outline of this part in his later work on original Confucianism [Yuan Ru ...]). Hence, the central...