Xiong was born to a poverty-stricken family in
Huanggang, Hubei. 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 () in
Nanjing headed by
Ouyang Jingwu (), 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 () in the Philosophy Department at Peking University. Ouyang Jingwu recommended Xiong and passed Liang Shuming a draft on which Xiong had been working entitled
An Outline of Consciousness-only. Impressed with Xiong's work, Cai Yuanpei, on Liang's recommendation, invited Xiong to Peking University where Xiong, much to the chagrin of Liang Shuming, destroyed his draft and instead wrote and published in 1932 what is now considered his major work
A New Treatise on Consciousness-only (新唯识论, xin weishi lun). In his
New Treatise, Xiong criticized the old Yogacara masters, such as the brothers
Vasubandhu and
Asanga (4 c.), as well as their successors,
Dharmapala (530-561) and Xuanzang (c. 602–664), for their theory of seeds in which seeds, stored in the eight or 'storehouse' consciousness (alayavijnana), become discrete causal agents that 'perfume' (bring into being) all mental and physical
dharmas. However, he also used the insights of Buddhism to reconstruct Confucianism. Much of his philosophy is influenced both by Buddhism and by his study of the
Book of Changes, which he regarded as the fundamental classic of Confucianism. Xiong felt that his mission was to assist China in overcoming its social and cultural crisis, and simultaneously to search for truth. He felt compelled to find and develop the
dao of Confucius to meet the force of Western culture. 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. With the strong aggression of European culture, our authentic spirit has been extinct. People are accustomed to self-disregard, self-violence, self-abandonment. Everything is copied from the outside, with little self-establishment. Hence the
New Treatise must be written. The first edition of the
New Treatise was written in Classical Chinese, and in 1944 Xiong published a Colloquial Chinese version which was in actuality a complete rewriting of the original work. In 1958–59 Xiong published
On Original Reality and Function and
Illuminating the Mind. Together, these two books form a revised account of his
New Treatise. After the founding of the
People’s Republic of China, Xiong stayed on the mainland and continued to lecture at
Peking University. In the 1950s, Xiong sought to reconcile Confucian teachings with socialist ideology. Invoking the concept of harmonious flows as the condition for the world's disclosure, Xiong concluded that the revolution would sweep away political conflicts and bring greater peace to humanity. He was subjected to physical abuse at the beginning of the
Cultural Revolution. He died at the age of 84 in 1968. ==Philosophy==