I. A Historical Sketch
II. Ch’an Spirituality
Thomas P. Kasulis
III. Four Ch’an Masters
Dale S. Wright
IV. The Encounter of Ch’an with Confucianism
Robert E. Buswell, Jr.
Henrik H. Sorensen
I. The Birth of Japanese Buddhism
II. The Impact of Buddhism in the Nara Period
Thomas P. Kasulis
III. The Japanese Transformation of Buddhism
I. Saicho
II. Kukai
Paul B. Watt
III. Heian Foundation of Kamakura Buddhism
I. Early Pure Land Leaders
III. Shinran’s Way
I. A Historical Sketch
II. Dogen
III. Three Zen Thinkers
I. Buddhist Responses to Confucianism
II. The Buddhist Element in Shingaku
Paid B. Watt
III. Jiun Sonja
Paul B. Watt
. 417
Philosophy as Spirituality
The Way of the Kyoto School
James W H e i s i g
I N THE EIRST OE A series of talks delivered on Basel radio in 1949, Karl
Jaspers described philosophy as the concentrated effort to ecome
oneself by participating in reality;* 1 For the historian of the Western
intellectual tradition, the description may seem to exaggerate t e
importance of only one ingredient in the practice of philosop iy, ut it
applies well to the group of Japanese thinkers known as the Kyoto sc oo .
Their pursuit of philosophical questions was never detached from t e cu ti
vation of human consciousness as participation in the real. Drawing on
Western philosophy ancient and modern as well as on their ov\ n Bu 11 st
heritage, and combining the demands of critical thought with the quest or
religious wisdom, they have enriched world intellectual history wit a res
Japanese perspective and opened anew the question of the spiritua i men
sion of philosophy. In this article I would like to focus on this re igious
significance of their achievement.
It might be thought that the philosophy of the Kyoto school is inaccessi
ble to those not versed in the language, religion, and culture of Japan. Rea
in translation, there is a certain strangeness to the vocabulary, and many o
the sources these thinkers take for granted will be unfamiliar. They pre
suppose the education and reading habits of their Japanese audience, so
that many subtleties of style and allusion, much of what is going on
between the lines and beneath the surface of their texts, will inevitab y e
lost on other audiences. Still, it was not their aim to produce a merely Bu
dhist, much less Japanese, body of thought, but rather to address funda
mental, universal issues in what they saw as the universally accessible lan¬
guage of philosophy. That is why their work has proved intelligible and
367
368
JAPAN
accessible far beyond Japan, and why it is prized today by many Western
readers as an enhancement of the spiritual dimension of our common
•humanity.
Opinions differ on how to define the membership of the Kyoto school,
but there is no disagreement that its main pillars are Nishida Kitaro
( 1870 -1945) and his disciples, Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) and Nishitani
Keiji (1900—1990), all of whom held chairs at Kyoto University. Similari¬
ties in interest and method, as well as significant differences among the
three, are best understood by giving each a brief but separate treatment.
Nishida Kitaro: The Quest of the Locus of Absolute Nothingness
For Nishida the goal of the philosophical enterprise was self-awakening: to
t e phenomena of life clearly through recovering the original purity of
experience to articulate rationally what has been seen, and to reappraise
i eas t at govern human history and society with reason thus enlight-
^ r ^ nce realit y ls constantly changing, and since we are part
t at c ange, unde)standing must be a “direct experiencing from within”
« lCU a * l °n °f what has been so understood must be an internalized,
°P nate expression. Accordingly, Nishida’s arguments are often post
murk k StI *n Ct j ( j? S a P at ^ of thinking he had traversed intuitively, led as
absorbin ^ ^ ^ SCnSe rea ^ c y as by the Western philosophies he was
A o •
a flv npfl r k- t0 aV T e een struc ^ one da y while on a walk by the buzzing of
confirmed ^ ^ ou £hts, he only “noticed” it later, but this
and are krp lm * , C ord i nar iness of the experience where things happen
brines the r n0tlCed accordi ng to biased habits of thought. “I heard a fly”
between an Xand "X’-X 10 ^ prOCess distorts >nto a relationship
saw actualiri^ a y * event is pure actuality. Somehow, he
atel’y distract COnStIt . Ute SUbjeCtS ° b i ects > but then mind is immedi '
purity of the n * ° ^ S * S and i ud £ men t, never to find its way back to the
ter mind from t-k ex P er * ence - To recover that purity would be to unfet-
nicating the experience?'^ COnst [ aints of bein S reasonable or of commu-
that mind leans f r 1 °' ° Se wbo d ‘ d not sbare it. This does not mean
PlyXt W Z r. e S c nSeS t0 SOme privile S ed -errant state, but sim-
what can onlv h ^ .!™, ltS ,° ltS Unbound, bodily existence, mind reaches
what can only be called a kind of boundlessness.
da’s starri experience prior to the subject-object distinction was Nishi-
a clea r ? COurses throu S h the pages of his collected works like
stream. In the opening pages of his maiden work, A Study of the Good,
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
369
Nishida calls it “pure experience,” borrowing a term from the American
philosopher William James. His attraction to the idea, however, stems less
from James, or indeed from any Western thinker, than from his own Sino-
Japanese tradition. We read, for instance, in the eleventh-century Buddhist
Record of the Transmission of the Lamp that “the mental state having achieved
true enlightenment is like that before enlightenment began”; or again, the
great Noh dramatist Zeami (1363-1443) comments on how the Book of
Changes deliberately omits the element for “mind” in the Chinese glyph for
“sensation” to indicate a precognitive awareness. 4 Such was the tradition
out of which Nishida stepped into his study of philosophy and forged what
he was later to call his “logic of locus.” 5
The Logic of Locus
In its forward, rational construction, the process of restoring experience to
its purity—the aim of the logic of locus—may be described graphically as
a series of concentric circles. 6 The smallest circle, where the center is most
in control of the periphery, is that of a judgment where something is pred¬
icated of a particular subject. (Japanese does not suffer the ambiguity of the
term “subject” here as Germanic and Latin languages do, where the gram¬
matical subject is easily confused with the subject who makes the judg¬
ment.) Thus “The rose is red” is like a small galaxy with the rose at the cen¬
ter and redness revolving about it like a planet. Nishida interpreted Aris¬
totle’s logic of predication as focused on the subject, which provides a sta¬
ble center of gravity for its attributes and the comprehension of which
grows as more and more attributes are given orbit about it. Nishida sought
for his own logic the same solid foundation that Aristotle's “subject that
could not become a predicate,” provided, but without the metaphysical
nuisance of “substance.” To do so, he reversed the emphasis by following
the predicates. In other words, he shifted his attention away from expand¬
ing description or analysis of the object to releasing predication from the
subject-object framework in order to see where the process itself takes
place.”
As reported by his students, he would then draw a second circle on the
blackboard surrounding the first, opening the field for other predicating
judgments. The galaxy of particular judgments is now seen to rest in a larger
universe where the original, grammatical subject has forfeited its position
of centrality to the thinking subject who makes the judgment in the first
place. This is the locus of reflective consciousness. It is not the world; nor is
it even experience of the world. It is the consciousness where judgments
370
JAPAN
about the world are located—indeed where all attempts to know and con¬
trol reality by locating it within the limits of the thinking processes of
human beings find their homeground.
The predicate “red” is no longer bound to some particular object, and
particular objects are no longer limited by their satellite attributes or the
language that encases them. Everything is seen as relative to the process of
constructing the world in mind. The move to this wider circle shows judg¬
ment to be a finite act within a larger universe of thinking.
This gives rise to the next question: And just where is this consciousness
itself located? If mind is a field of circumstances that yield judgments, what
are the circumstances that define mind? To locate them deeper within the
mind would be like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp
by his own pigtail. Recourse to the idea of a higher subject for which ordi¬
nary consciousness is an object is a surrender to infinite regress. Still, if the
notions of subject and object only set the boundaries for conscious judg¬
ment, this does not preclude the possibility of a still higher level of aware¬
ness that will envelop the realm of subjects and objects.
To show this, Nishida drew another circle about the first two, a broad one
with broken lines to indicate a location unbounded and infinitely expand¬
able (though not, of necessity, infinitely expanded), a place he called “noth¬
ingness. This was his absolute, deliberately so named to replace the
a solute of being in much Western philosophy. Being, for Nishida, cannot
e a solute because it can never be absolved from the relationships that
ne it. The true absolution had to be—as the Japanese glyphs zettai indi¬
te cut off from any and every “other.” Absoluteness precludes all
subject and object, all bifurcation of one thing from another,
all individuation of one mind or another.
is defined by its unboundedness, this place of absolute nothingness
f lAlf ° CUS r ° 1 sa * vat i° n > °f deliverance from time and being. It is the
ment o t e philosophical-religious quest where the action of intuition
sciousness take place without an acting subject and in the immedi-
^ c mornent > where the self working on the world yields to a pure
, 4 ^- ° aS lt lS ' * C iS moment of enlightenment that is right at
an in t e ere an -now, all-at-once-ness of experience. The final circle is
t us on e w ose circumference is nowhere and whose center can be any-
W L CrC ; C lma &^ was ta ken from Cusanus, but the insight behind it was
there in Nishida from the start.
In fact, over the years Nishida employed a number of idioms to express
sel f- awa ren ess at the locus of absolute nothingness, among them: “appro-
priation, acting intuition, seeing without a seer,” and “knowing a thing
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
371
by becoming that thing.” In his early writings he is somewhat inhibited by
Neo-Kantian epistemological conundrums, but he advances steadily to an
integrated view ol how consciousness takes shape, with a Hegelian empha¬
sis on its embeddedness in the historical praxis of a bodily agent. He comes
to see knowing not as the activity of a self-empowered subject but as “act¬
ing intuition” in which the very idea of the subject grasping objects has
been superseded. This intuition is no longer a spying on reality as the ulti¬
mate “other,” but a participation in the self-actualization of reality itself. In
other words, awareness of the unbounded, absolute character of nothing¬
ness which arises out of reflection on immediate experience is not meant to
detach the subject from the real world but to insinuate its presence still
deeper there. “True reality,” he writes, “is not the object of dispassionate
knowing— Without our feelings and will, the actual world ceases to be a
concrete fact and becomes mere abstract concept.” 7
This idea of participating in reality by overcoming the subject-object
dichotomy was given logical form by Nishida in a deliberately ambivalent
formula that can be read “an absolute self-identity of contradictories or a
self-identity of absolute contradictories.” The Japanese apposition allows for
both and he made free use of the double-entendre , depending on whether he
wished to stress the radical nature of the identity achieved or the radical
opposition of the elements that go into the identity. A further ambiguity in
the formula, less transparent in the texts, is the qualification of the identi¬
ty as a j^-identity. For one thing, the identity is automatic. It is not induced
from without, nor is it forced on a stubborn, resistant reality. It takes place
when the limitations of the narrow circles of subject-predicate and subject-
object are overcome. Here “identity” refers to the way reality is, minus the
interference of reflective mind, and the way the mind is when lit up by real¬
ity. At the same time, the true identity of reality is not independent of that
of the true, awakened self. It is not that the self is constructed one way and
the world another; or that the deepest truth of the self is revealed by
detaching itself from the world. The apparently absolute opposition
between the two is only overcome when the individual is aware that “every
act of consciousness is a center radiating in infinity ” 8 —that is, out into the
circumferenceless circle of nothingness.
In all these reflections Nishida is pursuing a religious quest, a summation
of which he attempted in a rambling final essay, “The Logic of Locus and a
Religious Worldview.” We see Nishida, on the one hand, at pains to clarify
the roots of his logic of locus in Buddhist thought; on the other, to clarify
his understanding of religion as not bound to any particular historical tra¬
dition. Religion is not ritual or institution, or even morality. It is “an event
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JAPAN
of the soul” which the discipline of philosophy can enhance, even as religion
helps philosophy find its proper place in history. This “place” is none other
than the immediacy of the moment in which consciousness sees itself as a
gesture of nothingness within the world of being. For consciousness does
not see reality from without, but is an act of reality from within and there¬
fore part of it. This is the fountainhead of all personal goodness, all just soci¬
eties, all true art and philosophy and religion for Nishida.
Absolute Nothingness
Nishida s idea of absolute nothingness, which was later to be taken up and
developed by Tanabe and Nishitani each in his own way, is not a mere gloss
on his logic of locus. His descriptions of historical praxis as “embodying
absolute nothingness in time,” 9 and religious intuition as “penetrating into
the consciousness of absolute nothingness” 10 are intended to preserve the
experiential side of the logic and at the same time to assert a distinctive
metaphysical position. But at a more basic level, the idea of nothingness
itself is the stumbling block for philosophies which consider being as the
most all-encompassing qualification of the real, and which see nothingness
aS C ^ c * ass of everything excluded from reality.
n is search for the ultimate locus of self-awakening—the point at which
a lty recognizes itself, through the enlightened consciousness of the
man individual, as relative and finite—Nishida could not accept the idea
su P re me being of ultimate power and knowledge beside which all else
unb n ° , m ? re . C ^ an a P a ^ e analogy. He conceived of his absolute as an
k e - n ° Ur L,/“ circumstance rather than as an enhanced form of ordinary
had b C ^° CUS . being in reality could not itself be another being; it
was b° C SOmet ^ n £ that encompassed being and made it relative. Being
with one S a ^ 0rm c °dependency, a dialectic of identities at odds
other ^ ^ e ^ nin & one another by each setting itself up as non-
Only a p S t C t L° ta ^ t ^ suc h things, being could not be an absolute,
of f u _ ?j t . t e ^-embracing infinity of a nothingness could the totality
of Che world which beings m0 ve exist at all.
p-jon ; n ^^ s ^ lc ^ a ^cognized that “God is fundamental to reli-
rehVin 0rm ‘ ^is left him with two options: either to redefine what
r i ’ ! particularly Christianity, calls God as absolute nothingness; or
. I ° W e a ^ so ^ ute being is relative to something more truly
, 1S 1 a ° Un ^ a c bird way: he took both options. Nishida’s God
a so ute eing -in- absolute nothingness.” The copulative in here
meant to signal a relationship of affirmation-in-negation (the so-called
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
373
logic of soku-hi which Nishida seems to owe more to D. T. Suzuki than to
the Buddhist sources on which Suzuki drew). The two terms are bound to
one another by definition. In the same way that there cannot be a creator
without creatures, or sentient beings without a Buddha, Nishida writes,
there cannot be an absolute being without an absolute nothingness. On the
one hand, he insists that the absolute is “truly absolute by being opposed
to absolutely nothing.” On the other, “the absolute is not merely non-
relative_It must relate to itself as a form of self-contradiction. 12
Even his clearest remarks in this regard are something of a logical tangle
and continue to perplex his commentators. 13 Insofar as I have been able to
understand the texts, Nishida’s reluctance to absorb God without remain¬
der into absolute nothingness seems to stem from his need to preserve the
element of pure experience in awakened selfhood. Metaphysically, he
refused to pronounce on God’s nature or existence. But “dropping off body
and mind to be united with the consciousness of absolute nothingness 14 is
also a religious act, and one that transforms perception to “see eternity in
the things of everyday life.” As such, it is an engagement of one’s truest,
deepest self with a radical, absolute otherness. Nishida recognized this basic
“spiritual fact” to be the cornerstone of religion, articulated in God-talk or
Amida-talk as nowhere else in philosophical history. In other words, if the
absolute in itself is “absolved’’ of all dependence on the relative, there is yet
a sense in which the absolute for us must be nearer to our true selves than
anything else can be. The very nature of absolute nothingness was bound to
this contradiction: “In every religion, in some sense, God is love. 15 It is also
the point at which logic must finally yield to experience, and hence where
Nishida’s perplexing prose can best be read as a philosopher’s bow to religion.
Clearly Nishida’s notion of absolute nothingness is different from the
“beyond being” ( eji'e/cEiva njs ovoia ?) of classical negative theology. If any¬
thing, his idea of locating nothingness absolutely out of this world of being
may be seen as a metaphysical equivalent of locating the gods in the heav¬
ens. His point was not to argue for an uncompromising transcendence of
ultimate reality, but to establish a ground for human efforts at self-control,
moral law, and social communion that will not cave in when the earth
shakes with great change or life is visited by great tragedy. True, the per¬
sonal dimension of the divine-human encounter (and its reflection in Chris-
tological imagery) is largely passed over in favor of an abstract notion of
divinity not so very different from the God of the philosophers that Pascal
rejected. In general, Nishida alludes to God as an idiom for life and cre¬
ativity minus the connotations of providence and subjectivity. But for one
so steeped in the Zen Buddhist perspective as Nishida to have given God
374
JAPAN
such a prominent place in his thought proved to be a decisive ingredient in
opening Kyoto-school philosophy to the world.
On the whole, Nishida’s “orientalism” is restrained to an ancillary role in
his philosophy. Zealous disciples, less secure in their philosophical vocation
and lacking Nishida s religious motivation, have been preoccupied with
finding in him a logic of the East distinct from that of the West. Nishida
himself did not go so far. Rarely, if ever, does he set himself or his ideas up
as alternative or even corrective to “Western philosophy” as a whole. He
was making a contribution to world philosophy and was happy to find affil¬
iates and sympathetic ideas, hidden or overt, in philosophy as he knew it.'
That said, his attempts to return the true self awakened to absolute noth¬
ingness to the world of historical praxis rarely touch down on solid ground.
Even the most obvious progression from family to tribe to nation to world
is given little attention. In principle he would hardly have rejected such an
expansion of the self (though it must be said that during the war years, he
came dangerously close to describing Japanese culture as a kind of self-
enc osed world with the emperor as the seal of its internal identity). But this
was not his primary focus, and in fact he never found a way to apply his
search for the ultimate locus of the self to the pressing moral demands of
The bulk of his reflections on the historical world concerns general,
uctures of human acting and knowing in time rather than the relation of
p cu ar nations and cultures to universal world order. The attainment of
true self ultimately lies beyond history; it happens in the “eternal now.”
■ [ C most ^ mrne diate existential fact of the I-Thou relationship is
„ . , Ce . virtuall y w khout ethical content into the abstract logic of the
entity of opposites in which the I discovers the Thou at the bottom
own interiority. These questions provided the starting point for the
contributions of Nishitani and Tanabe.
Tanabe Hajime: Locating Absolute Nothingness in Historical Praxis
any of the young intelligentsia of his generation, Tanabe was attract-
C Trr ^ an< ^ ori S inalit y of Nishida’s thinking. But his was a tem-
perament 1 erent from Nishida's. His writings show a more topical flow
o ideas and a passion for consistency that contrasts sharply with Nishida’s
tive eaps o imagination. If Nishida’s prose is a seedbed of suggestive¬
ness w lere one needs to read a great deal and occasionally wander off
etween t e ines to see where things are going, Tanabe’s is more like a
mathematical calculus where the surface is complex but transparent. Nishi-
a s wor , it has been said, is like a single essay, interrupted as often by the
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
375
convention of publishing limits or deadlines as by the end of a thesis. One
problem flows into the next, not in the interests of a unified system of
thought but in pursuit of clarity about the matter at hand. Tanabe—and
for that matter, Nishitani also—were more thematic and produced essays
that can stand on their own and be understood as such.
When Meiji Japan opened its doors to the world in the mid-nineteenth
century after two hundred years of cloister, it immediately-inherited intel¬
lectual fashions that had been nurtured during the European enlighten¬
ment and the explosion of modern science. Not having been part of the
process, Japan was ill-prepared to appropriate its results critically. That the
road should have been a bumpy one, very different both from the West and
from its Asian neighbors, is understandable. As Japan was going through
its restoration to the community of nations, the countries of Europe were
struggling with the idea of national identity. National flags, songs, and
other more ritual elements aside, we find for the first time a widespread
concern with distinctive national literatures and philosophies, along with
national psychologies. The human sciences, all in their infancy, were caught
up in this fascination even as they tried to monitor it. While the cosmopol¬
itan spirit of the enlightenment struggled to survive this test of its roots,
the natural sciences and technology proudly marched in the van of a
transnational, transcultural humanity. Throughout it all, Japan swayed
back and forth between a total infatuation with the superior advances of
Western culture and a rigid determination to carve out for itself a unique
position in the world.
Nishida suffered this ambiguity as a man of his age. 'While he never
sought translation of his thought into foreign languages, he did recognize
the need for ties with the contemporary world of philosophical thinkers. To
this end, Tanabe was sent by Nishida to study in Europe, where word of
Nishida’s work had already stirred interest. Whereas Nishida could calmly
pen German phrases here and there in his diaries and skim through English
and French books without the fear of criticism at home, the young Tanabe
had to struggle with the daily life of a foreigner clumsily making his way in
a tongue and culture he had so far only admired from a distance. In the
course of time, a certain resentment seems to have built up in him over
Nishida’s insistence that he pursue neo-Kantian thought. His own interests
turned him in the direction of phenomenology, but on returning to Japan
he was met with a request of Nishida for a major paper on Kant for a col¬
lection celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the latter s death. Its
composition was a turning point for Tanabe.
In his essay Tanabe argued that Kant’s third Critique lacked an important
376
JAPAN
ingredient that Nishida s philosophy could supply. Specifically, he tried to
wed the idea of self-awakening to Kant’s practical reason in order to shift
the foundations of morality away from a universal moral will in the direc¬
tion of absolute nothingness. On the one hand, he saw that awareness of
nothingness could provide moral judgment with a telos outside of subjec¬
tive will. This “finality of self-awareness,” as he termed it, could provide “a
common principle for weaving history, religion, and morality into an insol¬
uble relationship with one another. On the other hand, it dawned on him
that Nishida’s true, awakened self effectively cut the individual off from
history. On completion of his essay, he turned to Hegel to fill the gap. In
time he realized that Hegel’s absolute knowledge was lacking content, and
he set out to think through the possibility of praxis in the historical world
grounded in the self-awareness of absolute nothingness. Nishida, for his
part, was hard at work on his logic of locus, but Tanabe was not persuaded
t at it would solve his problem. During this period he developed his dialec-
c of absolute mediation as a way of establishing the bond between
absolute nothingness and the historical world . 16
hilosophical questions aside, two things should be noted with regard to
I e ^ attem pts to draw the philosophical vocation closer to the histori-
xj. , .^ r * ^ rst °f a ll, the tendency to be abstract that Tanabe criticized in
rec a Ver ^ muc ^ ^is own problem. In fact, on his own account he
ness^^ ^ aw * n m y speculative powers” as responsible for his abstract-
no y ; Tanabe S & en * us > as apparent as it was to his students, was
took an C ° r C e overwhelming presence of Nishida, towards whom he
i t y er more critical position even as he continued to measure his own
qnnr?l° P ^ pr °£ ress as a Japanese working primarily with Western
, h S agam ^ Nlshida ’ s contributions. As Nishitani recalls, the dialectic
j i S a van ^ ln g seems to give us a mirror-image of Tanabe himself
e y struggling to escape the embrace of Nishida’s philosophy .” 18
Absolute Nothingness and the Logic of the Specific
On the occasion of Nishida’s retirement, when the academic world was pil-
I r eS ° n * ts ^ rst and greatest world philosopher, Tanabe wrote a
xj- i -i g l plGC j e devious ly entitled “Looking Up to Nishida.” Leaving
tv’ TT t0 1S . °^ C l ocus > Tanabe (who now held Nishida’s chair at
yoto niversity) prepared the way for his own “logic of the specific” by
p esting t at the religious experience that goes by the name of the ‘self-
a ening o a solute nothingness ... belongs outside the practice and
anguage o p i osophy, which cannot put up with such a complete lack of
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
377
conceptual definition.... Religious self-awareness must not be set up as the
ultimate principle of philosophy .” 19
The religious bent in Nishida’s philosophy was fed by his many years of
sitting in zazeii and his ongoing contact with Buddhist and Christian
thinkers. Tanabe’s religiosity was more bookish. No less than Nishida, he
shied away from turning the philosopher’s trade against organized religion
and tried to get to the heart of religious and theological thinkers, but his
religiosity was a more solitary one. No diaries and few letters remain to let
us suppose otherwise. The irony is that Tanabe is remembered as the more
religious figure because of a postwar book on penitential philosophy in
which he criticizes the profession he had devoted his life to, himself includ¬
ed, for its moral timidity.
Tanabe’s contribution to Kyoto-school philosophy as a religious way, as I
have said, cannot be separated from his uneasy relationship with Nishida,
which stimulated him to look closely at some of the questions Nishida had
skimmed over in his creative flights and which also gave him the founda¬
tions for doing so. From Nishida he received the idea of approaching reli¬
gious judgments in terms of affirmation-in-negation, as well as the convic¬
tion of absolute nothingness as the supreme principle of philosophy. Fur¬
ther, like Nishida, he did not consider anything in Japanese language or
thought a final measure of what was most important in his philosophy.
These attitudes he passed on, passionately, to the students. Finally, like
Nishida he never argued for the supremacy of any one religious way over
any other. What he did not take from Nishida, however, was a conviction
of the primacy of religious experience as an “event of the soul which phi¬
losophy may or may not try to explain but can never generate. For Tanabe,
there is no unmediated religious experience. Either it is appropriated by the
individual in an “existentially philosophic” manner or it yields to the
specificity of theology, ecclesial institution, or folk belief . 20
Tanabe’s search for his own philosophical position began with a meticu¬
lous rethinking of Hegel’s dialectic as applied to a philosophy of absolute
nothingness. Along the way he became convinced that for nothingness to be
absolute, it was not enough for it to serve as a principle of identity for the
finite world from a position somewhere outside of being. It must be a dyna¬
mic force that sustains the relationships in which all things live and move
and have their being. He could not accept the idea that the historical world
in which opposites struggle with one another to secure their individual
identities is being driven inexorably towards some quiet, harmonious, beatific
vision in absolute mind; neither could he feel at home in the private awaken¬
ing to a true self within. Precisely because all things without exception are
34. Nishida Kitaro, age 46 (1916).
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
379
made to struggle with one another for their individuality, the dialectic is an
absolute fact of being cannot be accounted for within the world of being
alone. Only a nothingness outside of being can make things be the essen¬
tially interactive things that they are. But the reverse is also true: “Insofar
as nothingness is nothingness, it is incapable of functioning on its own.
Being can function only because it is not nothingness .” 21
If nothingness allows the world to be, awakening to this fact serves as a
permanent critical principle in all identity, whether in the sense of a lofty
philosophical principle like Nishida’s self-identity of absolute contradicto¬
ries or in the sense of the ordinary psychological self-composure of the indi¬
vidual mind. It is the fire in which all identity is purged of the fictions of
individuality and substantiality that mind attaches to it, leaving only the
pure awakening to that which has itself no conflict, no otherness: nothing¬
ness. This purification of the mind was Tanabe’s test of religious truth. In
its terms he appreciated the great figures of the Buddhist and Christian
religious past.
The logic of the specific is testimony to the fact that Tanabe never made
peace with his own tendency to distance himself from the historical world
in the way Nishida did. Many of the latter’s young disciples had turned the
sharp analysis of Marxism against Nishida’s fixation on self-awareness, but
to little avail. Tanabe, in contrast, from his critical reading of Kant, had
come to see that the subject of consciousness is not a mere individual who
looks at the world through lenses crafted by nature for the mind without
consultation. It is also a by-product of specific cultural, ethnic, and epochal
conditions. In its purgative function, the awareness of absolute nothingness
demands that even our most treasured theories be seen as bundles of rela¬
tionships not within our control. We cannot speak without a specific lan¬
guage nor think without circumstances with a history. We are not individ¬
uals awakening to universal truths, but stand forever on specificity, a great
shifting bog of bias and unconscious desire beyond the capacity of our mind
to conquer once and for all. Nothingness sets us in the mire, but it moves
us to struggle against it—never to be identified with it, never to assume we
have found an identity of absolute contradictories that is not contaminated
by specificities of history. This “absolute negation” is the goal of religion . 22
Philosophical Metanoia
The problem for Tanabe was to salvage a meaning for self-awakening in this
logic of the specific and not resign oneself to the cunning of history. It was
not a lesson he taught himself in the abstract but rather one that was forced
380
JAPAN
on him by his own injudicious—and probably also unnecessary—support of
state ideology at the height of Japan’s military escapades in Asia. The logic
that he had shaped to expose the irrational element in social existence was
now used to set up against the “clear-thinking gaze of existential philoso¬
phy” something more engaging: the “praxis of blessed martyrdom” in a
“war of love.” Proclaiming the nation as the equivalent of Sakyamuni and that
“participation in its life should be likened to the imitatio Christi ,” 23 Tanabe
lost touch with the original purpose of his logic of the specific.
While these sentiments frothed at the surface of Tanabe’s prose, a deep
resentment towards the impotence of his own religious philosophy seethed
within him, until in the end it exploded in the pages of his classic work Phil¬
osophy as Metanoetics. It was no longer enough to posit absolute nothingness
as a supreme metaphysical principle grounding the world of being. It must
be embraced, in an act of unconditional trust, as a force liberating the self
from its native instinct to self-sufficiency. The notion of faith in Other-
Power as expressed in the Kyogyoshinsho of Shinran (1 173—1262) gave Tanabe
the basic framework for his radical metanoia and reconstruction of a phil¬
osophy from the ground up.
It is no coincidence that the heaviest brunt of his penitential attack on
overreliance on the power of reason fell on the head of Kant’s transcendental
philosophy, but from there it reaches out to a reassessment of virtually all
his major philosophical influences, from Hegel and Schelling to Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. Woven into this critique is a positive and
unabashedly religious insistence on what he calls “nothingness-in-love” or
compassionate praxis in the historical world. The principal model for this
ideal is the Dharmakara myth of ascent-in-descent in which the enlight¬
ened bodhisattva returns to the world in order to certify his own awakening,
but frequent mention is also made of the Christian archetype of life-in-death,
which was to dominate certain of his later works. 24 In any case, his aim was
not to promote any particular religious tradition over any other but to bridge
the gap between absolute nothingness and concrete reality in a way that a
simple leap of self-awareness could not accomplish. He drew on religious
imagery because it seemed to keep him focused on the moral obligation of
putting the truth of enlightened mind to work for the sake of all that lives.
As it turned out, the purgative, “disruptive” side of his metanoetics over¬
shadowed the practical, moral side and left him on shaky ground when it
came to taking his new “philosophy that is not a philosophy” beyond its ini¬
tial statement. Tanabe was aware of this, and devoted his late years to rein¬
forcing the foundations of his logic of the specific, fusing elements from
Zen, Christianity, and Pure Land in the forge of a loving, compassionate
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
381
self-awakening. But when all was said and done, Tanabe, like Nishida,
remained aloof from the concrete problems of science, technology, economic
injustice, and international strife that were shaking the foundations of the
historical world outside the walls of his study. His was to the end a philos¬
ophy committed to uncluttering the mind of its self-deceptions, but forever
haunted by the knowledge that only in the hopelessly cluttered specificity
of history can moral praxis exert itself. The vision he left us is a portrait of
his own struggles with the intellectual life: a seamless robe of ideals tattered
by experience but not rent, whose weave remains a testimony to the
weaver’s dedication to the philosophical vocation as a spiritual way.
Nishitani Keiji: From Nihility to Nothingness
With Nishitani, the philosophical current that flowed from Nishida
through Tanabe spread out in fresh, new tributaries. Not only did he carry
over Tanabe’s concern with historical praxis; he also drew the ties to Bud¬
dhism closer than either of his senior colleagues had done and closer, as
well, to the lived experience of the philosophical quest. In addition, Nishi¬
tani took up in his philosophy two major historical problems, each pulling
him in a different direction. He was preoccupied, on the one hand, with fac¬
ing the challenge that modern science brought to religious thinking; on the
other, with establishing a place for Japan in the world. All of this combines
to give his writing a wider access to the world forum.
More than Nishida and Tanabe, Nishitani turned his thought on a world
axis. He actively welcomed and encouraged contact with philosophers from
abroad, and in his final years many a foreign scholar beat a path to his small
home in Kyoto. 25 He, too, studied in Germany as Tanabe before him, and
later was to travel to Europe and the United States to lecture. The happy
combination of the publication of his major work, Religion and Nothingness,
in English and German translation, the rising number of Western scholars
with the skills to read fluently in the original texts, and the great human
charm of Nishitani as a person, helped bring the work of the Kyoto philoso¬
phers to a wider audience. Still, given the trends in Continental and Amer¬
ican philosophy at the time this was happening, it was unsurprising that it
was the theologians and Buddhologists who were most attracted to Nishi-
tani’s work. Only after his death did neighboring Asian countries like
Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong begin to show an interest in him and other
of the Kyoto-school philosophers. But for all his cosmopolitan sentiments,
Nishitani followed, his predecessors in showing favoritism towards the
West—as had virtually all Japanese philosophers since the Meiji period.
382
JAPAN
In defending himself against the Inquisition, Galileo presented what has
become the central assumption of modern science. “I am not interested,” he
said, "in how to go to heaven, but in how the heavens go.” This dichotomy
was one that Nishitani never accepted. Not only had the West got it wrong
in separating philosophy from religion, its separation of religious quest
from tne pursuit of science also seemed to him fundamentally flawed. Any¬
thing that touches human existence, he insisted, had its religious dimen¬
sion. Science is always and ever a human enterprise in the service of some¬
thing more, but when the existential element is sacrificed to the quest for
scientific certitude, what we call life, soul, and spirit—including God—
find their home destroyed. Nishitani’s response was not to retreat into
preoccupation with the true self, but to argue that only on the self’s true
homeground do the concrete facts of nature "manifest themselves as they
are, in their greater ‘truth’.” 26
In Nishitani the concern with true self reaches its highest point in Kyoto
p ilosophy. He saw this as the focal point of Nishida’s work and interpreted
anabe s philosophy as a variation on that theme. In his own writings he
rew to the surface, through textual allusions and direct confrontation with
t e original texts, many of the Zen and Buddhist elements in Nishida’s
^ VOr ‘ ^ Suzuki s efforts to broaden Zen through contact with Pure
an Buddhism also reverberate in Nishitani’s writings, though not as
cep y as they do in Tanabe s. In addition, he turned directly to Christian
t eo ogy both for inspiration and to clarify his own position as distinct from
the Christian one.
P er ^ a P s the single greatest stimulus to Nishitani’s broadening of
ishidas philosophical perspective was Nietzsche, whose writings were
never far from his mind. The deep impression that Thus Spoke Zarathustra
a made on him in his university years left him with doubts so profound
at, in the end, only a combination of Nishida’s method and the study of
en Buddhism was able to keep them from disabling him. As a scholar of
[ osophy he had translated and commented on Plotinus, Aristotle,
oe me Descartes, Schelling, Hegel, Bergson, and Kierkegaard—all of
w °m e t their mark on his thought. But Nietzsche, like Eckhart, Dogen,
^ \ an ' ^^-te, ^ en P oets > and the New Testament, he seems to have
rea t rough the lenses of his own abiding spiritual questions, resulting in
rca mgs of arresting power and freshness.
The fundamentals of Nishitani’s own approach to the true self as a philo¬
sophical idea are set forth in an early book on "elemental subjectivity.” This
term (which he introduced into Japanese from Kierkegaard) is not one that
Nishida favored, but Nishitani’s aim is not substantially different from that
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
383
of his teacher: to lay the philosophical foundation for full and valid indi¬
vidual existence, which in turn would be the basis for social existence, cul¬
tural advance, and overcoming the excesses of the modern age. Written at
the age of forty and under the strong influence of Nishida, the work con¬
tains in germ his own mature philosophy.
As with Nishida, the Achilles’ heel of Nishitani’s highly individual
approach to historical questions was its application to questions of world
history. In the attempt to lend support during the war years to elements in
the Navy and government who wanted to bring some sobriety to the mind¬
less antics of the Japanese Army in Asia, his remarks on the role of Japan¬
ese culture in Asia blended all too easily with the worst ideologies of the
period, and the subtle distinctions that made all the difference to him as
they did to Nishida and Tanabe caught up in the same maelstrom earn
him little sympathy today in the light of subsequent events. Nishitani suf¬
fered a purge after the defeat of Japan and never returned to these ques¬
tions in print. While he continued to write on Japan and the culture of the
East, he did so at a safe distance both from his own earlier opinions and
from the relentless pummeling of Marxist critics.
The Standpoint of Emptiness
To Nishida’s logic of locus and Tanabe’s logic of the specific, Nishitani
added what he called the standpoint of emptiness. He saw this standpoint
not as a perspective that one can step into effortlessly, but the achievement
of a disciplined and uncompromising encounter with doubt. The long
struggle with nihilism that lay behind him was far from merely academic.
As a young man, not yet twenty years of age, he had fallen into a deep
despair in which “the decision to study philosophy was, melodramatic as it
might sound, a matter of life and death for me.” 27 This was to be the very
starting point for his description of the religious quest: We become aware
of religion as a need, as a must for life, only at the level of life at which every¬
thing else loses its necessity and its utility.” 28
For Nishitani, the senseless, perverse, and tragic side of life is an unde¬
niable fact. But it is more than mere fact; it is the seed of religious aware¬
ness. The meaning of life is thrown into question initially not by sitting
down to think about it but by being caught up in events outside one s con¬
trol. Typically, we face these doubts by retreating to one of the available
consolations—rational, religious, or otherwise—that all societies provide to
protect their collective sanity. The first step into radical doubt is to allow
oneself to be so filled with anxiety that even the simplest frustration can
384
JAPAN
reveal itself as a symptom of the radical meaninglessness at the heart of all
human existence. Next, one realizes that this sense of ultimate is still
human-centered and hence incomplete. Now one gives oneself over to the
cfoubt entirely, and the tragedy of human existence shows itself as a symp¬
tom of the whole world of being and becoming. At this point, Nishitani
says, it is as if a great chasm had opened up underfoot in the midst of ordi¬
nary life, an "abyss of nihility.”
Whole philosophies have been constructed on the basis of this nihility,
and Nishitani threw himself heart and soul into the study of them, not in
order to reject them but in order to find the key to what he called the "self¬
overcoming of nihilism. The awareness of nihility must be allowed to grow
in consciousness until all of life is transformed into a great question mark.
Only in this supreme act of negating the meaning of existence so radically
that one becomes the negation and is consumed by it, can the possibility of
a breakthrough appear. Deliverance from doubt that simply transports one
out of the abyss of meaninglessness and back into a worldview where things
make sense again, Nishitani protests, is no deliverance at all. The nihility
itself, in the fullness of its negation, has to be faced squarely in order to be
seen through as relative to human consciousness and experience. In this
rmation, reality discloses its secret of absolute emptiness that restores
II in his philosophical terms, “emptiness might be
ca ed the field of ‘be-ification (lebtung) in contrast to nihility, which is the
neld of nullification’ (Nichtung ).” 29
her words, for Nishitani religion is not so much a search for the
te as one of the items that make up existence, as an acceptance of the
P "ss t at embraces this entire world of being and becoming. In that
acceptance—a "full-bodied appropriation” (tainin )—mind lights up as
ng t y as mind can. The reality that is lived and died by all things that
e an P ass awa Y in the world is realized” in the full sense of the
one s lares in reality and one knows that one is real. This is the stand¬
point of emptiness.
use it is a standpoint, it is not a terminus ad quern so much as a ter-
quo. t e inauguration of a new way of looking at the things of life,
new way of valuing the world and reconstructing it. All of life becomes,
he says a kind of “double-exposure” in which one can see things just as they
re an at the same time see through them to their relativity and tran¬
sience. Far from dulling one’s critical senses, it reinforces them. To return to
t ie case of science, from the standpoint of emptiness, the modern infatua¬
tion with explanation and fact is disclosed for what it is: a sanctification of
the imperial ego that willingly sacrifices the immediate reality of its own
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
385
true self for the illusion of perfect knowledge and control. To personify or
humanize the absolute, to rein it in dogmatically with even the most
advanced apparatus and reliable theories, is at best a temporary cure to the
perpetual danger of being overwhelmed by nihility. Only a mysticism of the
everyday, a living-in-dying, can attune our existence to the empty texture
of the absolutely real.
In general, it may be noted, Nishitani favored the term emptiness (S. suny-
ata) over Nishida’s “absolute nothingness,” in part because its correspon¬
ding Chinese glyph, the ordinary character for sky, captures the ambiguity
of an emptiness-in-fullness that he intends. In this seeing that is at the same
time a seeing-through, one is delivered from the centripetal egoity of the
self to the centrifugal ex-stasis of the self that is not a self. This, for him, is
the essence of religious conversion.
In principle, Nishitani always insisted that conversion entails engage¬
ment in history. While he appreciated, and often repeated, the Zen Bud¬
dhist correlation of great doubt with great compassion (the Chinese glyphs
for both terms are pronounced the same, daihi ), his late writings contain
numerous censures of Buddhism for its “other-worldly refusal to enter into
the affairs of human society,” for its “lack of ethics and historical conscious¬
ness,” and for its “failure to confront science and technology.’ 30
In his principal philosophical discussions of history, however, Nishitani
tends to present Christian views of history, both linear and cyclical, as a
counterposition to the fuller Buddhist-inspired standpoint of emptiness
despite the greater sensitivity of the former to moral questions. Emptiness
or nothingness did not become full by bending time back on itself periodi¬
cally, like the seasons that repeat each year, or by providing an evolutionary
principle that points to an end of time when all the frustrations of nihility will
be overturned, as is the case in Christian eschatology. He envisaged deliv¬
erance from time as a kind of tangent that touches the circle of repetitive
time at its outer circumference or cuts across the straight line of its forward
progress. Like Nishida, he preferred the image of an “eternal now that
breaks through both myths of time to the timelessness of the moment of
self-awakening. What Christian theism, especially in its personalized image
of God, gains at one moment in its power to judge history, it often loses at
the next in its failure to understand the omnipresence of the absolute in all
things. For Nishitani the standpoint of emptiness perfects the personal
dimension of human life by the addition of the impersonal, non-differenti¬
ating love, which was none other than the very thing that Christianity
reveres in the God who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust
alike, and who empties himself kenotically in Christ. 31 Yet here again, we
386
JAPAN
see Nishitani in later writings reappraising the I-Thou relationship and the
interconnectedness of all things, even to the point of claiming that “the per¬
sonal is the basic form of existence.
I*n the foregoing pages much has been sacrificed to brevity and a certain
forced clarity of exposition. Perhaps only the askese of struggling with the
original texts can give one a sense of the complexity of the Kyoto school
thinkers. Philosophically, many problems remain with the “logics” of Nishi¬
da, Tanabe, and Nishitani. Some of them have been superseded by more
recent philosophy; others will benefit from further study and comparison;
still others are perennial. The task of formulating philosophical questions as
religious ones belongs, 1 am convinced, among the latter.
Notes
1. Karl Jaspers, The Way to Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954),
14. Translation adjusted.
2. These two ideas are present from Nishida’s earliest writings. See his two brief
essays on Bergson in Nishida Kitaro zenshu (hereafter NKZ) 1:317-27; The idea of
appropnarion (jitoku) appears in An Inquiry into the Good , 5 1 (where it is trans-
ated realizing with our whole being").
3. Nishitani, Nishida Kitaro , 55.
n• °f the No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami , trans. by J. Thomas
i *T CI ^x Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984),
1 35 , 136 .
5. This term is sometimes translated as "logic of topes," but the connections to
nstotle which the term suggests seem to conflict with his own position,
o. bee Kosaka Masaaki chosakushu 8:98-101.
8 2L KZ see Inquiry into the Good , 49.
has V* W'itin&y 34. In order to capture the philosophical sense, the translator
a C , n , S °I? e llbertics w kh particular passages. A more literal translation was
81-no by YuSa Michiko in The Eastern Buddhist 19:2 (1986) 1-29, 20/1 (1987)
\j -T eX ' Ual re ^ crcnces to this idea may be found in Jacinto, La filosofia social de
Nishida Kitaro, 208—12
10. NKZ 5:182.
11. Last Writings , 48.
12. Last Writings, 68—69.
ichi 3 T d hC Al° ng " Standin8 debates amon £ Takizawa Katsumi, Abe Masao, Yagi Sei-
l an |zuki Ryomin over the reversibility or irreversibility of the relationship
... ween °d and the self,-as well as the wider debate over the obscure notion of
. m y erSe c ° rres pondence (gyakutaio) that appears in Nishida’s final essay, leave lit¬
tle hope of a final word on the subject.
, • 5:177 * The allusion, of course, is to Dogen’s Genjokoan.
15. NKZ 11:372, 454, 435.
PHILOSOPHY AS SPIRITUALITY
387
16. Tanabe Hajime zenshu (hereafter THZ) 3:7, 78—81.
17. THZ 3:76-77.
18. Nishitani, Nish id a Kitard , 167.
19. THZ 4:306, 318.
20. THZ 8:257-38.
21. THZ 7:261.
22. THZ 6:147-53.
23. THZ 7:24, 99.
24. Regarding his relation to Christianity, Tanabe referred to himself in 1948 as
a permanent Christian-in-the-making, ein werdender Christ who could never
become ein gewordener Christ (THZ 10:260). The distinction is more commonly
associated with Nishitani, who adopted it to describe his own sympathies with
Tanabe’s position.
25. See the special issue of The Eastern Buddhist devoted to the memory of Nishi¬
tani, 25:1 (1992).
26. “Science and Zen,” The Buddha Eye , 120, 126.
27. Nishitani Keiji chosakushu (hereafter NKC) 20:175—84.
28. Religion and Nothingness , 3-
29- Religion and Nothingness , 124.
30. See NKC 17:141, 148-50, 154-55, 230-31.
31. See especially Religion and Nothingness , ch. 2.
32. NKC 24:109.
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