Abstract

This essay explores how L iu Zhi 劉智, a Qing 清 dynasty Chinese Muslim thinker who used the language of Neo-Confucianism to write Islamic philosophy, navigated the fundamental incommensurability between the ontological frameworks of these two traditions. After a brief comparative account of the role of key terms like existence (wujūd) and substance (_shi_ 實) in Islamic and Confucian thought, this essay goes on to analyze modality and the function of principle (_li_ 理) in L iu Zhi’s work, particularly his Chinese translation of the Sūfī text _Lawāʾiḥ_ by Jāmī, to argue that his thinking has inherited certain key formulations from the Neo-Confucian tradition. As a result, he resists the essence-existence distinction in favour of positing the metaphysical as a set of moral and physical laws governing interactions in complex states of affairs.