School

Kyoto School quotes

The Kyoto School brings Zen and Mahayana insights into dialogue with Western philosophy, especially around nothingness, experience, and the religious worldview.

Overview

Nishida’s logic of place and contradictory self-identity, Nishitani’s religion and nothingness, and related figures (including Watsuji’s ethics of betweenness in adjacent debates) shape this hub’s English passages.

Historical notes

Emerging around Kyoto University in the early twentieth century, the school remains central to comparative philosophy of religion and modern Japanese thought.

Core ideas

  • Absolute nothingness is not mere negation.
  • Self and world co-determine in the place (basho) of experience.
  • Religion discloses a logic ordinary objectivity misses.
  • Emptiness (śūnyatā) can be philosophically articulated without slogans.

Thinkers in this archive

Nishida Kitaro , Nishitani Keiji , Watsuji Tetsuro

FAQ

What is the Kyoto School?

It is a modern Japanese philosophical movement engaging Western philosophy with Mahayana and Zen concepts, especially nothingness and experience.

Who are major Kyoto School thinkers?

Nishida Kitaro and Nishitani Keiji are central; related figures appear alongside them in comparative ethics and religion.

Where can I find Kyoto School quotes?

This school page gathers verified English renderings from the archive’s Kyoto School label.

  1. Pure experience is the state of experience just as it is, without the slightest addition of deliberative discrimination.
  2. To experience means to know facts just as they are.
  3. The good is the realization of personality.
  4. Pure experience is identical with direct experience.
  5. There must be an overturning, a radical conversion of mind, in any religion. Without it there is no religion.
  6. The religious consciousness does not arise out of our own selves; it is simultaneously the call of God or Buddha.
  7. Compassion always signifies that opposites are one in the dynamic reciprocity of their own contradictory identity. The religious will arise as the self-determination of this dimension of sympathetic coalescence.
  8. For what purpose do I exist?
  9. At the point of our deepest questioning of ourselves, the religious quest awakens in us.
  10. So long as the field of separation between within and without is not broken through, and so long as a conversion from that standpoint does not take place, the lack of unity and contradiction spoken of earlier cannot help but prevail among the things we take as real.
  11. Nothingness in the sense of emptiness (śūnyatā) is not separate from being, but always in a relationship with being: being-sive-nothingness, nothingness-sive-being.
  12. Religion cannot be fully understood either within the parameters of utility or from a sociological viewpoint alone.
  13. The locus of ethical problems lies not in the consciousness of the isolated individual, but precisely in the in-betweenness of person and person.
  14. Ethics is, in the final analysis, the study of ningen — the human person as both individual and social, as “betweenness.”
  15. Fūdo means wind and earth — the natural environment of a given land.
  16. We discover ourselves in the cold — and in the same moment we discover the cold in ourselves — before any sharp division of subject and object.