Learning from the past and present
Xiong Shili was originally named Jizhi, Shengheng and Dingzhong, and was known as Zizhen, Qiyuan and Yiyong. The term “ten powers” is a Buddhist term referring to the ten kinds of intelligence of Buddha Rulai, which is a metaphor for his superior wisdom, vast magical power and boundless magic power. Mr. Xiong took it and applied it to himself, which shows his bullishness.
It is said that Xiong Shili had made a “wild statement” since he was a child, “When I look out of the sky, there is no one like me.” Xiong Shili’s wife, Fu Jiguang, recalled that when she and Xiong Shili were on their honeymoon after their marriage, Xiong Shili used the honeymoon period to finish reading one of the Twenty-Four Histories, and when she saw that Xiong Shili was turning page after page very quickly, she wondered if he had read the content clearly and wanted to test him. So she chose one of the Twenty-Four Histories and asked him to tell the beginning of it. In this way, Xiong Shili’s arrogance was not in vain.
During his youth, Xiong Shili was influenced by the reformists and joined the Wuchang New Army. After the Xinhai Revolution, he served as a staff member of the Hubei Governor’s Office. After the failure of the Second Revolution, he went to Jiangxi to farm and teach.
After Chiang Kai-shek gained the military and political power of the Kuomintang, he turned to study and took it as his mission to explore the nature of life and enhance the morality of the nation. He once said, “I was thirty-five years old when I decided to pursue the path of scholarship, and this was the great transformation of my life, a period of rebirth.” “He vowed to study Chinese philosophy and thought in order to understand the scriptures of the past and to recognize the reasons for China’s stagnation. Therefore, I studied ancient studies with great care, not daring to be lax. When I was young, I read the six scriptures, but Confucius was a patriarchal thought and feudal thought, so I gave up on it. Later on, he concentrated on Buddhism for many years, but he did not dare to agree with it, and he came to an enlightenment, and recalled that the Great Book of Changes had already opened my way, so he returned to the Six Classics of Confucius.”
In 1922, he was hired as a special lecturer at Peking University to teach philosophy. When he first joined Peking University, he changed the prevailing classroom teaching to the old-style teacher-student exchange. Whenever he got to a good part of the lecture, he was often so excited that he could not help but give the audience a heavy pat on the head or shoulder, and then laugh out loud. Because of the heavy patting, students had to find a seat far away from Mr. Xiong when they listened to his lectures.
Arrogance
When he was at Peking University, Xiong Shili had an argument with Liang Shuming over his studies. At the end of the argument, Xiong Shili, not quite satisfied, took advantage of Liang Shuming’s turn and ran up to him and punched him three times, cursing him as a “fool” before stopping. It is said that his letters and writings were often written on the backs of used paper, and his handwriting was unpleasant.
In 1928, Xiong Shili was hired as a lecturer at the National Central University (now Nanjing University), and in 1932, when his student Mou Zongsan first met him, he looked “bearded, sickly, and wearing a melon cap, as if he were a doctor on the go”, but his arrogance seemed to remain unchanged. In the middle of his speech, he suddenly slammed the table and shouted, “In today’s world, only I, Xiong, can speak about the sons of the late Zhou, the rest are all nonsense.”
However, the arrogant Xiong Shili was still rich in the spirit of self-reflection, and he often severely analyzed himself in front of his friends. In a letter to Liang Shou Dian, he said, “I was born with a good ability to be open. However, the weight of my slowness is also too deep in my habits. The Yellow River is 10,000 miles long, dragging mud and stagnant water, and this is a self-contradiction.”
In 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek celebrated his 50th birthday, he asked Shao Li Zi to invite Xiong Shili to the presidential palace to celebrate his birthday. After the birthday banquet began, Xiong Shili was sitting at the main table without any modesty, and after drinking and eating wildly for a while, he pretended to be talking crazy and drunk. While others were competing to write congratulatory messages for Chiang Kai-shek, Xiong Shili wrote a poem called “Poem on the Inverted Pagoda”, a satire on Chiang Kai-shek.
When Xiong Shili finished writing it, he laughed wildly and went out and left. Chiang Kai-shek was in tears, but did not punish him.
In 1943, when another master of Chinese studies, Xu Fuguan, was an official in Chiang Kai-shek’s retainer’s office, he was entrusted by Chiang Kai-shek to present Xiong Shili with a check for one million yuan, which he yelled and scolded away. Chiang Kai-shek later gave him huge sums of money twice to finance his research institute, but Xiong Shili resigned and did not accept them. Chiang did not blame him either, which shows how tolerant the government was of intellectuals in the Republic of China.
Criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for forgetting its ancestors
While those scholars who are correct in their studies can only think along with politics, Xiong Shili, whose life is infused with the sons, is not. At a time when the Chinese Communist Party was in charge of the mainland, Xiong Shili, who was in Guangdong, made several requests to the Chinese Communist Party to go north: first, not to become an official; second, to return to Peking University to teach, but not to lecture, as usual; third, to travel south when it was cold and return north when it was warm. After the conditions were met, Xiong Shili traveled to Beijing via Wuhan.
After arriving in Beijing, a Chinese Communist Party member asked Xiong Shili about this, and Xiong said, “The problem is that we are learning from the Soviet Union, and we are treating the Soviet Union like our ancestors and Stalin like our father, but we are avoiding mentioning the thousands of years of excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation. He insisted on refusing to “reform” himself and wrote several times to Mao Zedong, asking for the establishment of a philosophy institute and permission to spread the old school. But Mao ignored him, but did not do anything to him either. After all, Xiong Shili’s energy was too great, and Mao still knew how to put and take.
At that time, Xiong Shili became the only professor at Peking University who taught at home and specialized in materialism. More peculiarly, he was also the only one who dared to rant and rave against all kinds of extreme leftist thinking, and his series of “materialist” works were even licensed for printing.
Protesting the Cultural Revolution, he died on hunger strike
“After the start of the Cultural Revolution, Xiong Shili was also raided and criticized. He was forced to live with relatives during the raids and criticisms. Xiong Shili, who deplored the fall of culture and humanity, did not hang statues of leaders in his home, but only set up seats for Confucius, Wang Yangming and Wang Shushan, and worshiped them every day. But at this time, his gaze was no longer radiant, his speech was no longer elegant and spontaneous, and his emotions were no longer passionate, but he “often sat alone at the table, with a stack of white papers in front of him and a bald pen in his hand, for a long time.
For a while, he kept writing letters to the central leaders, asking his family to send them out, and often wrote many small notes, even on his pants and socks, protesting against the Cultural Revolution. He often wore a faded gray cloth shirt with no buttons and a piece of twine tied haphazardly around his waist, and went out alone on the street or in the park, stumbling and stumbling, with tears streaming down his face, mumbling: “Chinese culture is dead! “Chinese culture is dead!” He wrote to a friend, “In his declining years, his heart is like a snow cellar, and Jiang Zhai has been the same participant for a thousand years.” Some say he was mentally unbalanced, but who started it?
On May 23, 1968, Xiong Shili passed away in Shanghai at the age of 84 due to organ failure caused by a hunger strike. When he died in Shanghai, the mainland was quiet, but Hong Kong and Taiwan held a grand memorial service for him.
Born in the late Qing Dynasty, Xiong Shili, a master of Chinese studies who had survived both Kuomintang and Communist rule, was eventually swallowed up by the brutal campaign of the Chinese Communist Party, and he was not the only one swallowed up by it.
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