Thinker

Nishitani Keiji quotes

5 passages in English · 1900–1990 · Kyoto School.

Overview

Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) was Nishida’s student and a central second-generation Kyoto School figure. Educated in Japan and briefly in Germany under Heidegger’s orbit, he taught at Kyoto University and wrote Religion and Nothingness (Japanese Shūkyō to wa nanika), which confronts modern nihilism through Zen and Mahāyāna emptiness.

Main ideas

Religion begins in the question of why I exist; at deepest self-doubt the religious quest awakens. Nishitani distinguishes relative nihility from absolute emptiness (śūnyatā): only by breaking the field of inner/outer separation can being-sive-nothingness be realized. Emptiness is not a thing beneath beings but the field where things are themselves in mutual non-obstruction.

Major works

  • Religion and Nothingness
  • The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism
  • essays on Zen and Western philosophy

Legacy

Nishitani remains a primary bridge between Kyoto School metaphysics, existential nihilism, and contemporary philosophy of religion.

Themes in this archive

Self (2) · Existence (1) · God (1)

  1. For what purpose do I exist?
  2. At the point of our deepest questioning of ourselves, the religious quest awakens in us.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Religion cannot be fully understood either within the parameters of utility or from a sociological viewpoint alone.