From the pine tree
learn of the pine tree
               (Basho)

For Western readers, Heidegger seems both close and exceedingly distant;
his thought appears in some ways home-grown and quite familiar, and in
other ways alien and strangely unfamiliar. Critics of his work sometimes
attack it as narrowly parochial or provincial, because of its presumed
rootedness in a local habitat (the Black Forest region) yet critics
(sometimes the same ones) also object to its aloofness, unintelligibility,
and penchant for "mysticism"--charges which (more than personal bias)
reflect a sense of cultural rupture. Heidegger himself would hardly have
been surprised by this conflicting reception. In his "Vom Wesen des
Grundes" he described human Dasein as a creature of "distance" or farness,
a distance which alone could nurture a true closeness to things and fellow
beings. Likewise, in his comments on Holderlin, he portrayed "homecoming"
not as a retreat into a native habitat but as a journey homeward through
the most distant peregrinations. These considerations apply to his own
philosophical journey, particularly to his much-discussed "overcoming" of
Western metaphysics--which by no means equals its simple erasure. Without
encouraging a cultural leap, Heidegger's "overcoming" led him into distant
and alien terrain, and ultimately in the direction of Eastern culture and
thought--a culture which Kitaro Nishida, the founder of the so-called Kyoto
School, has circumscribed as "the urge to see the form of the formless, and
hear the sound of the soundless."(n1) Attentiveness to this far-off sound,
I believe, is at the heart of Heidegger's distance and seeming aloofness.
More than any other Western thinker in the twentieth century, his thought
is culturally decentered, lodged at the crossroads of East and West--and
thus at the site of a possible or impending global dialogue.

In the present pages I want to explore one facet of this dialogue, namely,
the relationship between Heidegger and Zen Buddhism, as the latter is
represented or articulated by Keiji Nishitani. The choice of this facet is
not fortuitous. A leading representative of the Kyoto School and a former
pupil of Nishida, Nishitani has also been a close student of Heidegger's
work and refers in his publications frequently to the latter's teachings.
For his own part, Heidegger was not unfamiliar with the Kyoto School,
having become acquainted with its activities through visits by Count Shuzo
Kuki, a contemporary of Nishitani and, like him, a pupil or associate of
Nishida. References to the same Count Kuki, one may note, are interspersed
throughout the "Dialogue on Language" (or dialogue with a Japanese)
contained in Unterwegs zur Sprache.(n2) Given the extensive life work of
Keiji Nishitani, my discussion in the following will have to be selective
and circumscribed--in a manner which hopefully does not truncate the
richness of his insights. For English-speaking readers, the major
publication available in translation is Religion and Nothingness, a study
which, I believe, ably reflects the core of Nishitani's Buddhist outlook
and which I have chosen therefore as my guiding text. Again, my ambition is
not to present a comprehensive review; instead, I shall focus on one
crucial theme which permeates the entire study and which is central both to
Heidegger's philosophy and to Zen Buddhism: the theme of nothingness,
emptiness, or sunyata. My discussion shall explore affinities and
differences between Nishitani's and Heidegger's accounts--in the hope of
fostering and perhaps deepening an understanding of the respective
philosophical orientations and thus of contributing (modestly) to the
East-West dialogue.

As is well known, nothingness or emptiness stands at the center of all
forms of Buddhist thought, including Zen Buddhism; it is this aspect which,
to Western minds, frequently suggests an attitude of complete withdrawal or
world-denial. Yet, as one should note, nothingness here does not simply
mean negativity or denial; far from denoting a vacuum, the term designates
the inner core of reality or the other side of being--which carries
life-affirming and sustaining implications. It is in this sense that the
term figures in the title of Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness. As he
states in the opening chapter, nothingness or nihility comes to the fore
whenever the routine course of our life is disrupted by calamities or inner
doubt. "When we become a question to ourselves and when the problem of why
we exist arises," he says, "this means that nihility has emerged from the
ground of existence and that our very existence has turned into a question
mark." Once this happens, the taken-for-granted meaning of our life and our
world suddenly is shattered and we realize that we have been hovering over
an abyss all along. From the vantage of ordinary meaning, what surfaces at
this point is the "meaninglessness" that "lies in wait" at the bottom of
everyday, routine engagements and activities; in Zen Buddhist terms, a
nagging sense of nihility brings the "restless, forward-advancing pace of
life" to a halt and, instead, "turns the light to what is directly
underfoot." Both religiously and philosophically, this experience of
rupture or disruption, this stepping back to see what is underfoot, may be
described as a turning or conversion. In Nishitani's words: "This
fundamental conversion in life is occasioned by the opening up of the
horizon of nihility at the ground of life. It is nothing less than a
conversion from the self-centered (or mancentered) mode of being, which
always asks what use things have for us (or for man), to an attitude that
asks for what purpose we ourselves (or man) exist."(n3)

According to Nishitani, the turn to nothingness as emptiness is slow and
arduous and occurs over several successive steps. The first step of human
awareness is the standpoint of sense-perception and rational analysis--a
standpoint familiar to Western readers from the traditions of empiricism
and rationalism. For Nishitani, these traditions are predicated on the
separation or juxtaposition of consciousness and world, that is, on the
subject-object division pervading particularly modern Western thought. To
confront the world in this manner, he writes, means "to look at things
without from a field within the self"; it means assuming "a position
vis-a-vis things from which self and things remain fundamentally separated
from one another"--a position he variously calls the "field of
consciousness" or "field of reason." This position was epitomized and made
canonical in the thought of Descartes with his categorial distinction
between res cogitans (or consciousness) and res extensa (or extended
matter). On the one hand, he notes, Descartes established the ego cogito as
"a reality that is beyond all doubt," while on the other hand, things in
the natural world "came to appear as bearing no living connection with the
internal ego" and thus resembled "the cold and lifeless world of death." As
the study adds, this division and the treatment of the world as lifeless
mechanism came to furnish the foundation for natural science and for modern
scientific technology; for, from the vantage of the cogito, the world of
nature was bound to look "like so much raw material`' available for human
control and exploitation. Although modern natural science seeks to uncover
the objective and invariant "laws of nature," these laws are not
independent of the cogito and its designs to enhance its self-preservation.
"The significance of man operating in accord with the laws of nature, as
well as of the laws of nature becoming manifest through and as the work of
man," we read, is most thoroughly visible in "a technology dependent on
machinery." It is in this domain where "knowledge and purposive activity"
work in closest unity, that "the fog lifts" from modern science: "Machines
and mechanical technology are man's ultimate embodiment and appropriation
of the laws of nature."(n4)

In Nishitani's view, Descartes' skepticism or doubt was only partially
radical: because it accepted as given, or left unexplored, the status and
meaning of the cogito and its relation to the world. Once this acceptance
is canceled, once the cogito is no longer seen as a substance (or res), the
path is opened to a deeper radicalism, to the level of a nonsubstantive
subjectivity positing the world and itself out of its own nothingness. In
his words, this path leads to "the ground of the subjectivity of the
cogito," on a plane where "the orientation of the subject to its ground is
more radical and thoroughgoing than it is with the cogito." According to
Religion and Nothingness, this path has been opened up chiefly by modern
existentialism with its focus on alienated existence and the abyss of
self-constitution. "This way of thinking about the cogito," we read, "is
'existential' thinking." Radical reflection of this kind penetrates deeper
than "the self-evidence of self-consciousness clinging to itself"; rather,
it yields an awareness that "can only emerge in the reality of an Existenz
that oversteps the limits of being." In existentialist terminology, this
overstepping or transgressing is the hallmark of "ecstasy" or the ek-static
quality of existence--a quality which radically subjectifies nothingness.
From this deeper vantage, the study observes, nothingness is "shifted to
the side of the subject itself, and the freedom or autonomy of the subject
is said to be a function of existence (Existenz) stepping over itself into
the midst of nihility." Nishitani calls the domain opened up by existential
questioning the "field of nihility," a field closely connected with the
modern (Western) problem of nihilism. "Only when the self breaks through
the field of consciousness, the field of beings," he writes, "and stands on
the ground of nihility is it able to achieve a subjectivity that can in no
way be objectified." At this point, "nihility appears as the ground of
everything that exists"; as a corollary, consciousness with its separation
of inside and outside is "surpassed subjectively," so that nihility also
"opens up the ground of the within and the without."(n5)

As portrayed in the study, the leading representatives of subjective
existentialism are Nietzsche and Sartre, with Nietzsche being the more
radical of the two. Both thinkers, Nishitani notes, show similar
tendencies: "In each of them atheism is bound up with
existentialism"--which means that atheism or nothingness has been
"subjectivized" and nihility has become "the field of the so-called
ekstasis of self-existence." Yet, between the two, he adds, Nietzsche's
position is "far more comprehensive and penetrating" than Sartre's, due to
the latter's identification of existentialism with a subjective humanism.
Sartre, we are told, describes existence as a human "project," namely, as
the project of continually going beyond the self or continually
"overstepping" oneself. Thus, he recognizes a mode of transcendence or
self-transcendence which has the "form of ekstasis, a
standing-outside-of-oneself." However, this ekstasis remains grounded in
human subjectivity--which reconnects his thought with the Cartesian ego
(despite a shift from theism to atheism). Together with Descartes, he
shares the belief in the ego or cogito as basic warrant of cognitive truth.
Thus, whatever transcendence Sartre's position may allow for "remains glued
to the ego." While considering nothingness to be "the ground of the
subject," he nonetheless presents it "like a wall at the bottom of the ego
or like a springboard underfoot of the cogito," thus turning it into a
principle shutting the ego "up within itself." By contrast, Nietzsche much
more resolutely sought to transgress it the ego. As shown in his mature
works, Nishitani observes, Nietzsche attempted "to posit a new way of being
human beyond the frame of the `human', to forge a new form of the human
from the `far side', beyond the limits of man-centered existence, from
'beyond good and evil'." This direction was clearly evident in his image of
the "overman" seen as the embodiment of the doctrine that "man is something
that shall be overcome." Consequently, he adds, it was chiefly and
centrally in Nietzsche's work that atheism achieved "its truly radical
subjectivization" and that nihility acquired "a transcendent quality by
becoming the field of the ecstasy of self-being."(n6)

Yet, no matter how radicalized, subjectivity and subjectivization for
Nishitani do not constitute the endpoint of relentless doubt. What still
needs to happen, he points out, is a radical questioning of subjectivity
itself and of its ecstatic nihility; only through such questioning is it
possible to reach the level of "absolute emptiness" or sunyata--which is
the heart of Buddhist thought. Buddhism, he writes, goes beyond the
previous positions in speaking of "the emptiness of the nihilizing view" by
which it means "that 'absolute emptiness' in which nihilizing emptiness
would itself be emptied." From the vantage of this emptiness, both the
field of consciousness with its separation of inside and outside and the
nihility grounded in ecstatic self-being can for the first time "be
overstepped" or left behind--in favor of a sphere which is "the true
noground (Ungrund)." Buddhism thematizes as gateway to this no-ground the
experience of the "Great Doubt" where the distinction between doubter and
doubted drops away and where the self turns into or becomes doubt itself.
In the tradition of Zen, this passage is known as "the doubt of samadhi
(concentration)," which, in turn, is closely linked with the "Great Death"
and the achievement of the non-ego (anatman). In Western philosophical and
religious thought, the same passage was most perceptively envisaged by
Meister Eckhart with his distinction between God and godhead and his
equation of the latter with "absolute nothingness" which is also seen as
the matrix or field of "our absolute death-sive-life." The nothingness of
godhead envisaged by Eckhart, Nishitani comments, "must be said to be still
more profound than the nihility that contemporary existentialism has put in
the place of God"; in existentialist terms, nihility appears "as the ground
of self-being and renders it ecstatic, but this ecstasy is not yet the
absolute negation of being and thus does not open up to absolute
nothingness." This reservation applies even to Nietzsche's work . His later
thought, it is true, adumbrates distinctly the standpoint of "an absolute
negation-sive-affirmation." Yet, his "absolute affirmation or Ja-sagen"
finds expression in confusing formulas like "life" or "will to
power"--which brings into view the difference between life-affirmation as a
power "forcing its way through nihility to gush forth" and life as
"absolute death-sive-life."(n7)

The problem at this point is how to formulate and render intelligible
emptiness as absolute death-sive-life or negation-sive-affirmation. A
central chapter in the study, titled "Nihility and Sunyata," is devoted to
this question. As Nishitani observes, emptiness or sunyata is "another
thing altogether from the nihility of nihilism." As epitomized in Western
existentialism, nothingness as nihility is still seen as a reference point
of subjectivity or as something to which existence relates; differently
put: it functions as representational correlate of existence. By contrast,
nothingness in the sense of sunyata means emptiness of a kind that "empties
itself even of the standpoint that represents it as some 'thing' that is
emptiness" or to which existence merely relates. Basically, Buddhist
sunyata does not denote nihilism or nihility in the sense of a simple
negation of, or antithesis to, being; instead, it intimates the nothingness
of being or the emptiness harbored by being itself. In Nishitani's words:
"True emptiness is not to be posited as something outside of and other than
'being'; rather, it is to be realized as something united to and
self-identical with being"--a point captured in the phrase
"being-sive-nothingness." This view has deep roots in the tradition of
Mahayanah its opposition to the subject-object split and all forms of
conceptual bifurcation. "In the context of Mahayana thought," he adds, "the
primary principle of which is to transcend all duality emerging from
logical analysis, the phrase 'being-sive-nothingness' requires that one
 take up the stance of the 'sive' and from there view being as being and
nothingness as nothingness." From the vantage of the sive, attachment both
to (optic) being and to nothingness as nihility is overturned or canceled.
In this sense, sunyata represents "the endpoint of an orientation to
negation" by operating a double negation (which does not yield a bland
synthesis). In terms of the study, sunyata might be called "an absolute
negativity," inasmuch as it is a standpoint "that has negated and thereby
transcended nihility, which was itself a transcendence-through-negation of
all being." Along the same lines, emptiness can also be termed "an abyss
for the abyss of nihility."(n8)

As Nishitani elaborates, Buddhist sunyata coincides neither with
existentialist nihilism nor with Western-style atheism construed as denial
of a personal God. Drawing again on Meister Eckhart's distinction between
God and godhead, he sees the latter notion as transgressing the customary
division of theism and atheism. Eckhart, he writes, "refers to the
'essence' of God that is free of all form--the complete 'image-free'
(bildlos) godhead--as 'nothingness', and considers the soul to return to
itself and acquire absolute freedom only when it becomes totally one with
the 'nothingness' of godhead. This is not mere theism, but neither, of
course, is it mere atheism." The critique of a personalized divinity in
favor of emptiness finds a parallel in the transition from subjectivity or
the ego to a "selfhood" moored in nonbeing or nothingness. On the level of
everyday life--the level of sense-perception and reason--existence
construes itself as a self or person, and moreover as a self seemingly at
one with itself. At this point, selfhood or personality designates "a
self-enclosed confinement or self-entangled unity," one which is "shackled
to its own narcissism. It is a grasping of the self by the self, a
confinement of the self by the self that spells attachment to the self." As
previously indicated, existentialism opens up the "abyss of nihility," but
only by radicalizing subjectivity into a mode of ecstatic
self-constitution. Moving beyond this point, sunyata as emptiness involves
a radical "disentanglement" from self-attachment or subjectivity and a
transgression of the latter in favor of the non-ego. "In a word," Nishitani
writes, sunyata is "the field of what Buddhist teaching calls emancipation,
or what Eckhart refers to as Abgeschiedenheit (detachment)." The same field
might also be called selfhood in a new, nonsubjectivist sense: "True
emptiness is nothing less than what reaches awareness in all of us as our
own absolute self-nature." This paradox was well expressed in Dogen's
statement: "To learn the Buddha way is to learn one's self; to learn one's
self is to forget one's self."(n9)

It is in the context of his discussion of sunyata that Nishitani also
comments on Heidegger's work--in a manner which I find dubious or at least
puzzling. As he correctly remarks, Heidegger, since his early writings,
effected a close connection of being and nothingness: "In Heidegger's
terms, the being of beings discloses itself in the nullifying of
nothingness (das Nichts nichtet)." He also sensibly and persuasively
differentiates this conception from Sartre's mode of existentialism:
"Insofar as Sartre locates subjectivity at the standpoint of the Cartesian
ego, his nothingness is not even the 'death' of which Heidegger speaks, the
mode of being of this ego is not a 'teeing unto death'." Despite these
perceptive remarks, the study in the end ties Heidegger to existentialist
nihility or nihilism, that is, to a view which still treats nothingness as
negativity and as something outside of existence. In Heidegger's work, we
read, nothingness is still being viewed "from the bias of self-existence as
the groundlessness (Grundlosigkeit) of existence Iying at the ground of
self-existence" and thus as something "lying outside of the 'existence' of
the self." This view, Nishitani asserts, is evident in Heidegger's talk of
self-existence as "Held suspended in nothingness"--despite the "fundamental
difference of his standpoint from other brands of contemporary
existentialism or nihilism." As he grants, the notion of a suspension in
nothingness marks "a great step forward" in the conception of
self-existence as "existence-in-ecstasy." Nonetheless, the step falls short
of reaching sunyata "In Heidegger's case, traces of the representation of
nothingness as some 'thin"' that is nothingness still remain."(n10)

These comments can hardly be reconciled with Heidegger's texts. From his
early period, I believe, his writings sought to extricate themselves--by
and large successfully--from the equation of nothingness with negativity or
a realm "outside" being and existence. As articulated in Being and Time,
the notion of "being-unto-death" did not designate a terminal point or a
sphere beyond life, but an intrinsic possibility and defining character of
human existence itself. As Heidegger wrote at the time: "As the end of
Dasein or existence, death is Dasein's innermost possibility"--where
possibility does not mean a theoretical or practical option which Dasein
might or might not choose, but rather an inner latency or potential
steadily permeating life from the beginning. "Poised toward this
possibility," he added, "Dasein discovers its innermost potentiality of
being in which the very being of Dasein is at stake." As one may also
recall, Being and Time contained a strong critique of the modern reliance
on subjectivity and the cogito--a critique which in many ways resembled
Nishitani's. Taking a broad historical view, Heidegger's remarks spanned
the tradition of modern thought from Descartes over Kant to Husserl (and
the beginning of existentialism). While acknowledging the power of
Cartesian doubt, Heidegger challenged as dubious the basic Cartesian
starting point, namely, the ego as a thinking substance. "With the
principle 'cogito ergo sum'," he wrote, "Descartes claimed that he was
putting philosophy on a new and secure footing; but what he left
undetermined in this 'radical' departure was the mode of being of the res
cogitans or--more precisely--the ontological meaning of the 'sum'." A
similar half-heartedness, in his view, was operative in Kantian philosophy,
despite its comparative refinement of critical reflection. While exposing
previous misconceptions and confusions, Kant likewise neglected to
undertake a "prior ontological analysis of the subjectivity of the
subject"; although demonstrating the "untenability of the ontic thesis
regarding a psychic substance," he refrained from offering an "ontological
interpretation of selfhood." In attenuated form, the same defect was still
evident in Husserl's treatment of subjectivity and in Scheler's
(quasi-existentialist) notion of personality. Irrespective of the
differences between Husserl and Scheler, Heidegger observed, they concur at
least negatively in this respect: "They no longer raise the question of the
'being of a person'."(n11)

Antisubjectivism (as a gateway to nonbeing) remained a persistent theme in
Heidegger's evolving opus. While in Being and Time, nothingness was still
viewed mainly from the vantage of Dasein--which may be the basis for
Nishitani's objections--the issue was steadily radicalized in subsequent
writings, in a manner pointing (in my view) toward the field of sunyata. A
crucial marker along this road was the essay "What is Metaphysics?" written
shortly after the publication of Being and Time. As is well known,
metaphysics in that essay was placed in contrast to the outlook of modern
science (deriving from Descartes) with its focus on the res extensa as an
empirically given domain--and its consequent neglect of nothingness.
"Nothingness," Heidegger observed, "is absolutely rejected by science and
abandoned as null and void"--which means that "science wishes to know
nothing of nothing(ness)." In terms of the essay, nothingness was not
simply a synonym for negation or negativity. Instead of being a derivative
of negation or the semantic "not," Heidegger insisted that nothingness is
"more original than the 'not' and negation." From the vantage of Dasein,
nothingness was encountered in the state of "dread" (Angst), which was not
equivalent to mere anxiety or nervousness, but rather meant a basic
openness to nonbeing. It is at this point that the essay developed the
notions of the "nihilating" quality of nothingness (das Nichts nichtet) and
of the suspension or "suspendedness" (Hineingehaltenheit) of Dasein in
nonbeing--a suspension denoting Dasein's exposure not to an alien domain
outside of being but to its own intrinsic abyss. "Nothingness," Heidegger
stated, "is neither an object nor anything that 'is' at all; it occurs
neither by itself nor 'apart from' beings, as a sort of adjunct.
Nothingness is that which makes the disclosure of being(s) as such possible
for our human existence." Sharpening this point further, he added:
"Nothingness not merely designates the conceptual opposite of beings but is
an integral part of their essence. It is in the being of beings that the
nihilation of nothingness (das Nichten des Nichts) occurs."(n12)

A further, still more important marker on the same road were the so-called
Beitrage zur Philosophie, written about a decade after Being and Time (and
only recently published). As Heidegger noted in Beitrage, traditional
Western thought has tended to treat nothingness simply as negativity or a
vacuum--a view which readily gave rise either to a "pessimistic nihilism"
or to a "heroic" counterposture (centered on will to power). Transgression
of this traditional outlook required an "overcoming" of this kind of
nihilism or negativism. "Nothingness," he wrote, "is neither negative nor
is it a goal or endpoint; rather, it is the innermost trembling
(Erzitterung) of being itself and thus more real than any (optic) being."
Seen from this vantage, nothingness denotes neither a representational or
conceptual entity nor a propositional denial, but instead a "nihilating"
potency participating obliquely in the ongoing happening or disclosure of
being: "Non-being happens (west) and being happens or occurs; non-being
occurs through non-happening or non-disclosure (Unwesen), while being
occurs as nihilating agency." The relationship of being and nothingness is
thus one of mutual implication and intertwining, and not predicated on
antithesis or reciprocal exclusion. As Heidegger queried: "What if being
itself happened through self-withdrawal and thus in the mode of refusal?
Would such a refusal be simply nothing or rather the highest gift? And is
it due to this nihilating refusal of being itself that 'nothingness'
acquires that enabling potency on which all doing or creating depends?" In
articulating the relation of being and nothingness, Beitra'ge approximated
the "sive" postulated by Nishitani as characteristic of the field of
sunyata (and surfacing in expressions like "l "life-sive -death,"
"negation-sive-affirmation"). In Heidegger's sense, sive meant neither a
radical disjuncture nor a smooth blending but rather a chasm or discordant
mutuality: "And finally, regarding the Yes and No--where do both originate
together with their distinction and contrast? Differently phrased: Who
founded the difference between affirmation and negation, and the 'and'
relating affirmation and negation?(n13)

In light of these and similar textual passages, Nishitani's critical
objections can scarcely be sustained. Heidegger's thought, one may say,
departed not only from scientific objectivism but also from existentialist
nihilism (as defined in Religion and Nothingness) with its separation of
subjectivity and nonbeing. More importantly, Nishitani's own presentation
seems to depend strongly on something like Heidegger's notion of
"ontological difference" and of the discordant juncture of being and
nothingness. In the absence of these notions, I fear, his portrayal of
sunyata often appears strained or confusing and even perilously close to
metaphysical bifurcations (of inside and outside, within and without). As
previously indicated, genuine emptiness is said to be "united to and
self-identical with being." At the same time, however, sunyata is also
depicted as an "absolute transcendence of being," in that it "absolutely
denies and distances itself from any standpoint shackled in any way
whatsoever to being." In this sense, Nishitani asserts, emptiness can "well
be described as 'outside' of and absolutely 'other' than the standpoint
shackled to being--provided we avoid the misconception that emptiness is
some 'thing distinct from being and subsisting 'outside' of it." The
complexity of these comments--or their status at the verge of traditional
metaphysics--is compounded by these additional observations: "In spite of
its transcendence of the standpoint shackled to being, or rather because of
it, emptiness can only appear as a self-identity with being, in a
relationship of sive by which both being and emptiness are seen as
co-present from the start and structurally inseparable from one
another."(n14) Attention to Heidegger's writings, I believe, can rescue
these statements from opacity or contradiction, thereby enhancing the
persuasiveness of Nishitani's work--just as the latter can serve to
elucidate Heidegger's exploration of being-sive-nothingness as an
ontological happening (or Ereignis).

NOTES

(n1) - Kitaro Nishida, A Study of Good, trans. V. H. Viglielmo (Tokyo:
Japanese Government Printing Bureau, 1960), p. 191. See also Martin
Heidegger, "Vom Wesen des Grundes," in Wegmarken (Frankfurt Main:
Klostermann, 1967), p.71; and "Heimkunft/An die Verwandten," in
Erlauterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4
(Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann, 1981), pp.29-30.

(n2) - See Heidegger, "Aus einem Gesprach von der Sprache (Zwischen einem
Japaner und einem Fragenden)," in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske,
1959), pp. 83-155. On Nishitani and the Kyoto School see the "Foreword" by
Winston L. King and "Translator's Introduction" in Keiji Nishitani,
Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982), pp. vii-xiv. Compare also Frederick Franck, ea.,
The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School(New York: Crossroads,
1982), and Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a
Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, trans. James W. Heisig (New York: Paulist
Press, 1980). On the relation of the school and of Nishitani to Heidegger
see Yasuo Yuasa, "The Encounter of Modern Japanese Philosophy with
Heidegger," and Nishitani, "Reflections on Two Addresses by Martin
Heidegger," in Graham Parkes, ea., Heidegger and Asian Thought (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp.155-174 and 145-154.

(n3) - Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp.4-5.

(n4) - Ibid., pp. 9-11, 81-82.

(n5) - Ibid., pp. 14-17, 67.

(n6) - Ibid., pp. 31, 33, 55-56. With reference to Sartre, Nishitani
further elaborates (pp. 32-33): "We may well appreciate his intentions, but
... so long as we maintain the standpoint of self-consciousness, the
tendency to take ourselves as objects remains, no matter how much we stress
subjectivity. Moreover, even though Sartre's theory appears to preserve the
dignity of man in his subjective autonomy and freedom, the real dignity of
man seems to me to belong only to one who has been 'reborn', only in the
'new man' that emerges in us when we are born by dying, when we break
through nihility." The citation in the text is to Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966),
p.12.

(n7) - Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp.18,21, 34,59, 63, 65-66. The
difference, he adds (p. 66), can also be expressed as one "between a
nihility proclaiming that 'God is dead' and an absolute nothingness
reaching a point beyond even 'God"'; accordingly, one might perhaps say
"that the nihility of Nietzsche's nihilism should be called a standpoint of
relative absolute nothingness." In an intriguing side-glance (p. 59),
Nishitani brings emptiness in connection with the Christian notions of
kenosis and ekkenosis (self-emptying): "What is ekkenosis for the Son is
kenosis for the Father. In the East, this would be called anatman, or
non-ego."

(n8) - Religion and Nothingness, pp. 95-98.

(n9) - Ibid., pp. 99, 103, 105-107. The reference is to Dogen's Shobogenzo
genjokoan, trans. W. Wadell and A. Masao, in The Eastern Buddhist, n.s.,
vol. 5 (1972): 134.

(n10) - Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 33, 96, 98, 109.

(n11) - Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. (Tubingen: Niemeyer,
1967), pp. 24, 47, 250, 258-259, 263 (paragraphs 6, 9, 50, 52-53); trans.
John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson as Being and Time (London: SCM Press,
1962), pp. 45-46, 73, 303, 307-308, 366-367.

(n12) - Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?' in Walter Kaufmann, ea.,
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1975), pp.
244-246, 248-251 (translation slightly changed for purposes of clarity).

(n13) - Heidegger, Beitrage zur Philosophie ( Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe,
vol. 65 (Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann, 1989), pp. 246-247 (par. 129),
266-267 (pars. 145, 146).

(n14) - Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, p. 97.