Pure Experience and Intellectual Intuition

PURE EXPERIENCE AND INTELLECTUAL INTUITION – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*50
PURE EXPERIENCE AND

INTELLECTUAL INTUITION
Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons – Momoyama period (second half of 16th century)
“To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance
with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrications … by pure I am
referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of
deliberative discrimination.” (Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, 3)
“A true intellectual intuition is the unifying activity in pure experience. It is a

grasp of life, like having the knack of an art or, more profoundly, the aesthetic
spirit …it is an extremely ordinary phenomenon … from the standpoint of
pure experience it is actually the state of oneness of subject and object, a
fusion of knowing and willing.”(Nishida Kitaro An Inquiry into the Good,
32)
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Inquiring into the true reality of the universe from the

standpoint of no-mind
When Nishida, against the advice of his

tutor, dropped mathematics in favour of
philosophy, he regarded the latter as an
inquiry “into the true reality of the
universe.” (quoted by Yusa, Zen &
Philosophy – An Intellectual Biography
of Nishida Kitaro, 23). His three years
at Tokyo Imperial University were
Daitoku-ji Temple in Kyoto, where Nishida practiced
strictly focused on philosophy, though
he was introduced to Zen by a fellow student who became a lifelong friend,
Suzuki Daisetsu, best known as the Zen master who later introduced Zen to
American audiences. Nishida only embarked on a sustained Zen practice after
having secured his first teaching appointment and entered married life. From
1896 and 1906 (or 1907, when reference to Zen is dropped in his diaries),
Nishida sat in zazen morning and evening, attended several sesshins every
year at a Rinzai Zen temple, and worked on a koan. He regarded Zen as a
practice which would allow him to achieve the standpoint of no-mind, from
which an investigation of true reality could be pursued. In other words,
Nishida took the Zen standpoint of no-mind to be the most sophisticated
realisation of what has been called “Asian nothingness,” a “concrete,”
embodied, experiential, standpoint on reality which appears to have been
shared by many cultures in the ancient world, but has endured in the East as
the basis for its grasp of reality, while only surviving as an under-current in
the West.
No-mind as a standpoint accessible to all
Nishida, however, avoided any reference to Zen in his philosophical writings
as he feared that use of Zen terminology could result in his text being tied to a
particular psychological state. He was eager to produce works of philosophy
with a universal relevance that would be accessible to all. It is clear, however,
that throughout his lifetime, he carried out his philosophical inquiry into “the
true reality of the universe” from the standpoint of Zen, which had struck him
as “the most immediate and most fundamental standpoint.” (Nishida, “My
Philosophical Path,” quoted by Yusa, Ibid, 301). Robert E. Carter quotes Noda
Mateo as reporting that “Nishida often stated in his lectures that his aim was
to establish ‘a rational foundation for Zen.’” (Carter, The Kyoto School, 14)
Same doubt as Descartes, but different conclusion: knowledge

based on intuition and no “I”
In Part II of the Inquiry – which Nishida is said to have written before Part I
– Nishida appears to emulate Descartes when he invites us to “discard all
artificial assumptions, doubt whatever can be doubted, and proceed on the
basis of direct and indubitable knowledge,” asking “What is direct knowledge
that we cannot even begin to doubt?” To which he then answers: “It is
knowledge of facts in our intuitive experience, knowledge of phenomena of
consciousness.” (Nishida, Inquiry, 39). Quite different from Descartes’s
answer “I think therefore I am.” And this is where the ego-less standpoint of
no-mind, rather than the ego-centred standpoint of ordinary consciousness,
makes all the difference. At this early stage in the discussion, “direct
knowledge” is contrasted with “thinking,” which is a judgment coming later,
for the sake of interpretation and explication. Whereas judgment may err, the
direct intuitive experience of the facts of consciousness, which can only take
place in the present, cannot err. Therefore, Nishida writes: “All of our
knowledge must be constructed upon such intuitive experience.” (Nishida,
Ibid, 39). Nishida is really inviting us to sit on a cushion and cultivate the Zen
standpoint of no-mind, a direct experience of reality through a self free of
egoic attachments, observing the flow of thoughts, careful not to get caught
and carried away by any particular thought, and instead let all thoughts come
and let them go.
William James and Henri Bergson
Nishida had found in Henri Bergson a thinker who had elected to use
intuition as a starting point for his philosophical inquiry, and this encounter,
Yusa tells us, had given him the confidence to use intuition for his own
inquiry. Before reading Bergson, however, Nishida had read William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience and used the term “pure experience” to
refer to an experiential insight into concrete reality free of any conceptual
discrimination. In fact, the term “pure experience” has been regarded by
many scholars as Nishida’s first signature concept.
An Inquiry into the Good opens with the words: “To experience means to
know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely
relinquishing one’s own fabrications … by pure I am referring to the state of
experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative
discrimination.” (Nishida, Ibid, 3)
Before we even get to the bottom the first page, though, Nishida adds: “pure
experience is identical with direct experience. When one directly experiences
one’s own state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and
knowing and its object are completely unified. This is the most refined type of
experience.” (Nishida, Ibid, 3-4). That, again, is the sort of experience
achieved in zazen.
Wild Poppies
A big blooming buzzing confusion?
For William James, reality was “a that, an Absolute, a ‘pure’ experience on an

enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing
… It is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.” James spoke
of this “that” or “primal stuff,” in colourful terms – it was a “big blooming
buzzing confusion,” (James, Essays in Radical Empirism, quoted by Carter,
The Nothingness Beyond God 4) so as not to give the impression that this was
a sort of bland, monochrome substratum. Instead, the “that” of pure
experience is richer than the layer of concepts abstracted from it. “Out of this
aboriginal sensible muchness attention carves out objects, which conception
then names and identifies forever… We say what each part of the sensible
continuum is, and all these abstracted whats are concepts.” (James, Some
Problems of Philosophy quoted by Carter, Ibid, 6). Nishida shared with
James this notion that our concepts – the “whats” – offered a view of reality
which was poorer than the lived experienced reality. “Meaning and
judgments are an abstracted part of the original experience, and compared
with the original experience, they are meager in content.” (Nishida, Inquiry,
9). But, whereas James focused on the carvings as damage done to the
aboriginal flow which perhaps should be reversed, Nishida had his eyes on
the wider process whereby concepts emerged out of the background. He
pointed out that there could be really no such thing as a world outside
consciousness, since “to intuit things in themselves apart from our
consciousness is impossible.” (Nishida, Ibid, 39). So, what we see as reality is
made up of phenomena of our consciousness. “From the perspective of direct
knowledge that is free from all assumptions, reality consists only of
phenomena of our consciousness, namely, the facts of direct experience.”
(Nishida, Ibid, 39). “The so-called objective world … consists of these
phenomena unified by a kind of unifying activity.” (Nishida, Ibid, 54).
This unifying activity is intuition itself. That is, the very insight through
which I grasp reality is at the same time the unifying activity which organises
reality into a world. It is not unlike seeing reason as a faculty, as well as the
order of the world, except that, while reason is an activity of the mind
dissociated from the body (that is, feelings, emotions, will, etc), intuition is
a wholistic grasp by the heart-mind (Chinese xin, Japanese kokoro), it
is a grasp by one’s whole self, in the midst of life, in the present moment.
Pure experience includes thinking, thinking and intuition are

the same kind of activity
James compared concepts with the

“perchings” of birds in flight, places
where they stop to rest before
continuing their journey, and says that
an exclusive focus on such perchings
turns what is a dynamic flow – reality as
change – into a static entity – reality as
being. Nishida agreed with this view, but
Crane and wave – Hiroshige (1797-1858)
at the same time, saw that the flight
itself, i.e., the flow, is what led to the perchings, the conceptual cuttings, so
these, far from interrupting the flow, were its expressions. Didn’t a flying bird
stop at some point so that it can rest and recover strength to continue its
journey? The pause for rest is undoubtedly part of the journey. Likewise, the
conceptual extractions from the flow of consciousness – carried out to deal
with practical matters of everyday life – are part of that flow. In the restored
continuity of reality as phenomena of consciousness “Pure experience
includes thinking.” (Nishida, Ibid, 17). “Thinking and intuition are
usually considered to be totally different activities, but when we
view them as facts of consciousness we realise that they are the
same kind of activity.” (Nishida, Ibid, 41) Hence the addition of
“intellectual” to intuition. Whereas in the early stages of Zen meditation, the

practitioner is keenly aware of thoughts as intruding and trying to capture
his/her attention, as the practice becomes more intense in sesshins, and even
more so, when awakening is achieved, there is a sense that thoughts just flow
without altering the flow of consciousness. Such an integration of the
thoughts with the sensory flow undoubtedly suggests a continuity between
pure experience and “concepts,” that is, “ideal elements.”
Intellectual intuition: ordinary perception is compositional
When Nishida introduces the term “intellectual

intuition” in the last chapter of Part I, he explains
that “Ordinary perception is never purely
simple, for it contains ideal elements and is
compositional. Though I am presently looking
at something … I see it as mediated in an
explanatory manner through the force of past
experience.” (Nishida, Ibid, 30)
Carter says that Nishida’s “intellectual intuition”

“is not a form of sense perception, but a grasping
Kozuke – Hiroshige (1797-1858)
of “ideal” objects, such as the “unity” that
underlies all awareness. Nishida tells us that it is
an enlargement or deepening of pure experience. But because such awareness
is not logical or inferential, some scholars have suggested that Nishida ought
to have referred to it as “creative intuition,” a direct seeing of artistic,
religious, or moral insight. It is related to inspiration, an immediate seeing of
correct conclusion without calculation in any form. It is a state of awareness
that has transcended the subject/object distinction, resulting in a unified
experience out of which subject and object are carved.” (Carter, The Kyoto
School, 28)
“Our most natural, unified state of consciousness”
Awareness beyond the dichotomy of subject and object is not, however, a

special “state” which only Zen practitioners can ever achieved. It is a an
everyday occurrence as I, for example, walk down the street, with only a
background awareness of the houses and gardens on either side, though my
attention is normally focused on the pavement, or perhaps, where I am
headed for. But I would certainly notice if one of the houses I pass by had
burned down since the last time I saw it! I would also notice a tree having just
broken into blossoms. “Intellectual intuition,” is for Nishida a cosmic
unifying principle, the way consciousness itself is, something we more or less
take for granted – do we ever ask, how come I am conscious? It is accessed by
meditators and awakened individuals as well as by artists, scholars, as they
widen their consciousness in search of inspiration. But what is most
important for Nishida is that it is also at work within all of us. It is “our most
natural, unified state of consciousness. An innocent baby’s intuitions fall into
this category. Intellectual intuition is just that which deepens and enlarges
our state of pure experience; it is the manifestation of a great unity in the
systematic development of consciousness. When a scholar achieves a new
idea, the moral person a new motive, the artist a new ideal, the religious
person a new awakening, such a unity is manifesting itself.” (Nishida,
Inquiry, 32)
Intellectual intuition can be best understood in the context of Nishida’s

lifelong project of elucidating what could be called “the logic of the universe”
– how the One manifests into the many. Having rejected the infantile notion
of a God standing outside a world he created, Nishida later described
“creation” as a process being carried out in the present moment as the self-
determination of true reality (absolute nothingness), through our
consciousness, into the many phenomena of the world. In that scheme,
“intellectual intuition” is a moment in the process of that self-determination
which proceeds through the unification of consciousness into a meaningful

whole. Nishida later integrated this process into a dialectical process whereby
the world is both intuited and created through consciousness according to the
logic of self-contradictory identity. For Nishida, “God” is this very process
carried out from the standpoint of absolute nothingness, i.e., by the egoless
“empty” self.
For now, as defined in the Inquiry, “A true intellectual intuition is the

unifying activity in pure experience. It is a grasp of life, like having
the knack of an art or, more profoundly, the aesthetic spirit.”
(Nishida, Ibid, 32) Also “Intellectual intuition, the discernment of this single
reality, can be found not only in the fine arts but in all of our disciplined
behavior; it is an extremely ordinary phenomenon … from the standpoint of
pure experience it is actually the state of oneness of subject and object, a
fusion of knowing and willing.” (Nishida, Ibid, 32) It is both the “activity”
of unification and the “state” of oneness.
One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, Explained by the Nurse – Hokusai (1760-1849)
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THE LOGIC OF BASHO – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*50
THE LOGIC OF BASHO
Fishing boats on a lake – Hiroshige (1797-1858)
The field – basho – is “literally nothing, it is not a being at all,” since as a

universal, “the field has absolutely none of the characteristics applying to the
parts … It is the place, given as an intuition, as a whole, a gestalt, which
knowing, saying, analysing, and defining try to specify. They all distort the
original unity, take it apart, dissect it, re-structure it for specific purposes. So
long as such partial and ripped-out-of-context specification is seen as having
its place in its field, no damage is done, and indeed something is actually to
be gained … But such advantage is epistemologically sound if, and only if, one
returns to the source intuition again and again to re-structure it anew.”
(Robert E Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God p 32)
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As already noted, the problem with Aristotle – and Western thought as a

result – is that “in a real sense, Aristotle ends up conflating the essence of a
thing with its individual existence.”(Jaakko Hintikka, “The Varieties of Being
in Aristotle” in Knuutilla and Hintikka eds, Logic of Being quoted by Robert
E Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 22) He conflates the fact “that the
thing is” and “what it is,” with the result that the “that it is” of its “lived”
particular existence is concealed by “what it is,” its “name,” what it stands for
in the abstract interpretation of how reality works. For those familiar with
Heidegger, it is akin to what he called the West’s “forgetting of Being.” This
can be clearly observed in the sciences, where “most scholars, even the
physicist and sociologist, work from mathematical signs and documents, and
not directly from experience. Observations are to be written down, turned
into data, before they can be accurately handled. And there is hardly a whiff
of doubt entertained about whether the translation from observation to
paper, or to symbols on a blackboard, adequately captures the richness of the
immediate. Quite the contrary, the common assumption is that it is not
genuine data until it is verbalized, organized, or rendered precise through
translation to yet more precise formulae.” (Carter, The Nothingness Beyond
God, 20) Who has not been told by their physician that all the tests have
come back negative, your chemical markers are fine, the CT scan or the MRI
is fine. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with you. You are healthy! Yet, you
are still in pain, or feel ill in some way … How do you reconnect with the
concrete reality of the particular now hidden behind the screen of abstract
concepts? Aristotle stated: “To know a thing is to name it, and to name it is to
attach one or usually more universal predicates to it. Not only is the fixed
within the flow alone knowable, but the universal in the individual as well.
There is no place for the flow to be known as flow, nor the individual as
individual. These defects Nishida set about to repair.” (Carter, Ibid, 25-26)
“To say that one’s glass of wine is red … is to have already
“bought into” the system of wines and their types.”
The reason why Nishida started out with a focus on a recovery of “pure
experience,” which we must understand as a Western analogue of the Zen
state of no-mind, are now becoming clearer. From that standpoint, Nishida
took a fresh look at the link between the grammatical subject and predicate.
These are two universal concepts, two abstractions. Carter writes: “What …is
the link between the grammatical subject and predicate? Nishida’s
‘Copernican revolution,’ to so name it, is in hypothesizing that the proper
question is not “how are these two universal concepts unified or linked?” but
“how can such specification of the wider (more general) universal occur?”
The initial intuition already contains, at least implicitly, the
structure of the relationship. To say that one’s glass of wine is red,
then, is to have already “bought into” the system of wines and
their types.” (Carter, Ibid, 27)
Just as, in the Inquiry, Nishida stated

that “pure experience includes
thinking,” (Nishida, An Inquiry into
the Good ,17), he finds that the initial
intuition, which he calls “intellectual
intuition,” includes “the structure of
the relationship,” that is, that the
colour red necessarily arises at the
same time as the universal called “colour.” Already in the Inquiry, we read:
“If red were the only color, it would not appear to us as such,
because for it to do so there must be colors that are not red.
Moreover, for one quality to be compared with and distinguished from
another, both qualities must be fundamentally identical; two things totally
different with no point in common cannot be compared and distinguished. If
all things are established through such opposition, then there
must be a certain unifying reality concealed at their base.” (Nishida,

An Inquiry into the Good, 56), This unity concealed at the base of all colours
is the universal called “colour.” So the colour red and the universal called
“colour” are intuited in pure experience. The word “system” – instead of
“universal” – used by Carter when he says that “to say that one’s glass of wine
is red, then, is to have already “bought into” the system of wines and their
types,” refers to the fact that when things are given “names,” they are actually
“enveloped” by a multiplicity of universals, not just one – here the different
types of wines, the different brands for each type, the various vintages, the
many grape varieties used, the winemaking styles traditional to various
regions, etc.
So, Carter continues: “What is primary in the judgment “red is a color,” is not
the grammatical subject … the real subject of the sentence “red is a
color” is not “red,” nor even the grammatical predicate “color,”
but the system of colors itself. To have a concept of “red” is already to
have a concept of colors. Of course, the system, like “color” itself, has no
color.” (Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 27). As all things can only
appear in contrast with each other within pairs of opposites, the concept of
red is intuited at the same time as the concept of colour. “Color is a “field” in
which specifications arise … A field-theory takes the background as the
real foreground, the real subject. So, in a field of energy, focuses or
concentrations of energy are really specifications of the whole, just as in a Zen
rock garden, a particular shape simply calls attention to the undifferentiated
expanse on which it sits, or better, out of which it arises … “The field itself,
however, is not all colors… but that which supports, or even generates, colors
… “It is an intuition, a given of experience or conception of which individual
instances are but partial articulations.”(Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God,
29)
Japanese rock garden
“Emptiness is I.”
Nishida’s articulation of his field-theory was achieved not through theoretical

thinking, but, as he repeatedly reminds us, through pure experience. It is a
given of experience in the sense of pure experience or no-mind. One cannot
help hearing in the background of the discussion the famous formula of the
Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” “Form is emptiness”
refers to the discussion about the concealment of the concrete particular –
“that it is” – behind the veil of the empty universal used as predicate to say
what the thing is. “Emptiness is form” refers to the field – basho – of this
universal used as predicate, which is empty, and is intuited at the same time
as the thing, so rises up in experience as the ground of the thing, that which
grounds its presence.
Most of us have little difficulty accepting that “form is empty,” as it is enough

to compare various languages to see that reality is not made up of the same
bits and pieces for all humans. For example, not all cultures have the same
number of colours, some have only two or three. So it is easy to see how
culture impacts on what forms we actually see. But it is a lot more difficult to
really take on board the notion that “emptiness is form.” What it means is
that form – phenomena – the impermanent, and unsubstantial, is that
through which I apprehend the true reality which is nothingness. One can
further states that “emptiness is the self,” meaning that “I” am a self insofar
as “I” forget “my” self, so “I” am no-self, empty of self-conscious ego-
centredness. True self is no-(ego)self. And, as Masao Abe has it: “It is not
that “I am empty,” but rather that “Emptiness is I.” (Masao Abe, Zen
and Western Thought p 13)
Eager to stick to Aristotelian language, Nishida “speaks of this

as his logic of predicates, to contrast it with Aristotle’s logic of
the subject.” Carter finds this awkward because basho “is not
the actual grammatical predicate … It would be better to use his
other designation, however – the logic of place, for… the
place/system/field houses or grounds both the grammatical
subject and predicate. Basho, then, is that which is neither Horiki Iris Garden –
predicated of, nor present in, a subject, nor even the Hiroshige (1797-
grammatical subject, but that which grounds both, and 1858)

out of which both arise as specifications or determinations.”
(Carter, Ibid, 31)
From anatman/sunyata to wu/mu
Buddhist anatman, as the absence of own being, and the doctrine of co-
dependent origination, were tentatively theorized within the Indo-European
Brahmanic philosophical system based on a substantial definition of being.
Already at the time of the Buddha, Buddhism was challenged for failing to
clarify what was reborn, since it asserted that we had no “soul” which could
be reborn: so, how could actions produce karmic results in the absence of
substantial links between one life and another? The problem is that, in India,
emptiness was still perceived as a lack of something, and substance was
required to explain phenomena. As he could not answer his critics using the
language of substance, the Buddha resorted to keeping silent when asked
about philosophical questions. Even Nagarjuna’s elucidation of the
absence of “own being” as emptiness (sunyata), though it
certainly points to a reality beyond concepts, approaches
emptiness from an epistemological standpoint as it emphazises the
relativity of all concepts, and warns against the danger of grasping abstract
concepts as certainties, rather than using the experience of emptiness to
account for the process of thinking. It is only with the transfer of Buddhism to
the Far East, as sunyata came to be understood through Daoism’s own
understanding of nothingness, that experience displaced logic as the
standpoint of choice.
For the Chinese, and especially the Daoists,

nothingness – wu – was a concrete experience,
described not as a (negative) lack of being, but as the
background to a (positive) conception of reality as change,
with the life force generating forms as it flows through “all
things under Heaven”. Though “mu” and “sunyata” never
Wu (Japanese Mu)
entirely merged, this Chinese reliance on concrete,
embodied, experience allowed the masters of the Chan (Zen) School to switch
their standpoint from that of the Buddhist truth seeker still immersed in
dualistic ordinary consciousness trying to gain liberation through

enlightenment, to that of the realised master, who can speak directly from
their direct experience of the enlightened vision. It is that enlightened vision
that Nishida takes as his starting point, and which he first assimilates to the
empiricist inquiries described by James, Bergson, and later the
phenomenologists. In a sense, the Copernican revolution Nishida is credited
with is really a repeat of that which took place when Chan masters started to
teach from their experience of enlightenment. As they did, though, they also
provided the Daoist experience of nothingness with more sophisticated
meditational techniques as well as a stronger philosophical framework.
Nishida, once again coming back to the enlightened vision of no-mind, sought
to articulate what he saw using the language of Western philosophy which he
regarded as the best vehicle to ensure the survival of Zen teachings insofar as
they give access to the true nature of reality. This is how he arrived at this
notion of field or place, which was suggested to him by the Aristotelian
concepts of hypokeimenon and khôra. What this allowed him to do is to turn
the perspective around. Instead of saying “I see the world in front of me,” he
will say “the world is inside me” – as well as around me – but as inside me, as
constituting what I call my consciousness, the world is actually both
apprehended and re-shaped by me, as well as all other humans, as we co-
express the world. The metaphor of the field will be further developed by
Nishitani in Religion and Nothingness, where he contrasts the “field of
emptiness” – Nishida’s basho – and the “field of consciousness,” – Nishida’s
“object logic” – the former being the view from the enlightened standpoint of
no-self, the latter the view from ordinary, objective consciousness where we
see ourselves and objects as solid entities. We could say that the metaphor of
the place or field provides a spatial image that moves us away from our
unexamined presupposition of a substantial physical substratum.
Basho as both an (abstract) epistemological universal and a
(concrete) embodied intuition
For Nishida, the field – basho – is

“literally nothing, it is not a being at all,”
since as a universal, “the field has
absolutely none of the characteristics
applying to the parts … It is the place,
given as an intuition, as a whole, a
gestalt, which knowing, saying,
analysing, and defining try to specify.
They all distort the original unity, take it
Irises – Vincent Van Gogh
apart, dissect it, re-structure it for
specific purposes. So long as such partial and ripped-out-of-context
specification is seen as having its place in its field, no damage is done, and
indeed something is actually to be gained … But such advantage is
epistemologically sound if, and only if, one returns to the source
intuition again and again to re-structure it anew.” (Carter, Ibid, 32)
The concept of basho allowed Nishida to refine his early assertions that “pure
experience includes thinking,”and that “thinking and intuition, …when we
view them as facts of consciousness we realise that they are the same kind of
activity.” (Nishida, Inquiry, 31) As a field of nothingness, basho allows
thoughts to arise, an act which from the side of the individual consciousness
is referred to as “intellectual intuition,” but these conceptual bits cut out from
pure experience do no damage to the field, since the field is nothingness, just
as the pictures or words “displayed” on a screen can do no damage to the
screen, as you can discontinue the display and restore the screen to a blank
state for further displays. Provided you likewise “question” the conceptual
representation of reality and return to “pure experience” again and again,
“naming” in order to know and “thinking” in order to understand are fine. In
fact they are necessary to deal with practical life. When students of Buddhism
are warned against thinking, they often misunderstand this warning as

meaning that thinking is “bad” and a hindrance to enlightenment. Nishida
asserts that thinking is a natural activity of consciousness which it is futile to
even try to stop. The problem is attachment to specific conceptual
formulations, and the warning against thinking is in fact the equivalent of
Nishida’s invitation to return to “the state of experience just as it is without
the least addition of deliberative discrimination.” It is only an exercise in
returning to concrete reality to “restructure it anew.”
The self does not see reality outside, it is the field out of which
reality expresses itself
As Westerners, we see the world as emerging as a coherent order from a

chaotic substratum, according to a process of naming which seems to take
place in front of us, so “outside of us.” When told that this substratum is not
substantial, but nothingness, we may come to see the world as emerging out
of empty space in front of ourselves. But this is not what Nishida means.
Along with the East, Nishida sees reality as an experienced grasp of life as it
unfolds in the present moment. The self which experiences reality does not
“see” that reality, but, in a sense, “creates it,” or rather, is the place (basho)
where the formless self-expresses as the forms of reality. “Basho is the deep
self of pure experience … which is a manifestation of that unity which lies at
our depths.” (Carter, Encounter with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese
Ethics, 153)
Suwa Lake in the province of Shinano, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji – Hokusai (1760-1849)
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FROM NAGARJUNAʼS MIDDLE WAY TO NISHIDAʼS SELF-CONTRADICTORY IDENTITY – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*51
FROM NAGARJUNA’S MIDDLE

WAY TO NISHIDA’S SELF-
CONTRADICTORY IDENTITY
The Sanchi stupa was built by the Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, and its torana is the oldest in the
archaeological record, though it was most likely preceeded by toranas made out of wood. Both Chinese paifang
gateways and Japanese torii gateways have been derived from the Indian torana.
Inter-dependent-origination is what we call ‘emptiness’.

It is a dependent designation and is itself the Middle Path.
(Nagarjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 24.18)
Co-dependent origination = emptiness
Structurally the phrase “self-contradictory identity” is strongly reminiscent of

the doctrine of co-dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), the central
teaching of the Buddha, on which rests his assertion that all things are
“devoid of own being” (anatman) and that life is suffering: as things only
arise in dependence upon each other, they “are” only as “relative” to each
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other, and as such have no being of their own, they are unsubstantial and
transient, and our lives among these things which appear real but are not, are
necessarily full of suffering.
Co-dependent origination is the doctrine on which Nagarjuna focused to

refute developments in Buddhist philosophy still showing traces of
substantialism. “In the Abhidharma traditions anatman was usually
understood to be the fact that there is no persistent or abiding person as the
subject of our experience. What is real are the momentary dharmas which
constitute each stream of consciousness … For Nagarjuna, however, even
these dharmas lack an intrinsic-nature or an independent nature of their own
… since they are causally dependent upon other dharmas for their arising.
Emptiness, therefore, is a realisation of inter-dependent-origination
(pratityasamutpada) – the mutual relativity of all things.” (Richard King,
Indian Philosophy – An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought, 120)
Inter-dependent-origination is what we call ‘emptiness’.

It is a dependent designation and is itself the Middle Path.
(Nagarjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 24.18 – quoted by King)
Carter confirms that Nishida was influenced

by Nagarjuna. How could he not be, as
Nagarjuna’s core project had been the
restoration of the concept of sunyata
(emptiness) to its original central position in
the Buddha’s teachings? Some scholars,
ancient and modern, have argued that
Nagarjuna did not actually propose a
philosophy. Having showed that the
philosophical positions held by the many
Buddhist schools of his days, when followed
to their final conclusions, only led to Nagarjuna (c. 150-c. 250 CE)
absurdities, he could not possibly come up with yet another philosophical

position!
“Nagarjuna’s insight is that each and every philosophical position and claim
can be shown to be untenable because any assertion … is achieved at the risk
of downplaying one or more related concepts.” (Robert E Carter, The
Nothingness Beyond God, 64) brings to mind Heidegger’s statement that
concepts “conceal” as much as they “reveal,” and they do so in the very act of
revealing, because as they zero in on a particular view of reality, they hide
from view all other possible ways of seeing reality. Hence the need to
recognise that all views are necessarily and therefore ultimately incorrect.
Following David Kalupahana (Nagarjuna: The

Philosophy of the Middle Way), Carter writes that
Nagarjuna’s ‘middle way’ “is a rejection of
all closed dogmatisms, and advocates that
one remains non-attached to each and every
one of them ….What the Buddha and Nagarjuna
were attacking was a dogmatic arrogance which, in
it quest for absolute certainty and security, caused
thinkers to cling ‘like leeches to an objective world
as an ultimate reality’.” Note that Carter also states
that “non-attachment to views does not necessarily
mean having ‘no views’.” (Carter, Ibid, 63) What Tibetan Wheel of Life
this shows, as I see it, is that Nagarjuna was
functioning primarily as a dharma teacher warning his followers against the
dangers of becoming attached to dogmas. In other words, he is taking co-
dependent origination in only one of its possible interpretations – that of the
relativity of all things and the need to cultivate detachment from
philosophical views. Distrust of philosophy, and words in general, is found in
most schools of Buddhism.
There are, however, other ways of understanding co-dependent origination.

One can see in it evidence of the interconnectedness of all things, and turn it
into an invitation to be responsible for one’s actions, as they affect all: in that
sense, it is a social and ecological principle. Co-dependent origination has
often been presented by Buddhist scholars as an assertion of causality. “This
is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This ceases to be, because
that ceases to be.” Though a Western philosopher would point out that cause
is not actually asserted in these statements – only correlation – in practice,
Dharma students were indeed told to see how sensation causes desire, desire
causes craving, craving causes attachment, attachment causes suffering, etc.
and more generally, how all things are “conditioned,” that is, arising as the
product of conditions, and therefore relative to these conditions. Whereas in
Greece, causality was used as a means to understand reality and master it, to
the point that “what is,” in Western philosophy, is defined as “what has a
reason or cause” – nihil est sine ratione – in India, what has a cause was the
exact opposite – as it was the result of conditions, it was not really real – only
what had no cause, that is, what was uncaused and permanent, was really
real.
When looking at co-dependent origination, Nishida did not see it as an

assertion of causality, and, though in broad agreement with Nagarjuna’s
emphasis on the relativity of all things and the need for detachment from all
conceptual views, he did not see in the context of the pursuit of
enlightenment, as obstacles to be tackled and overcome. Instead, he saw the
co-arising of concepts as the process of knowledge through
differentiation of opposites within a unified field of nothingness.
Red does not “cause” blue and yellow to exist, but red arises at the same time
as the universal “colour.” This arising, of course, also allows other
colours to be seen, but it is something positive. The emptiness of
the universal allowed phenomena to arise,

and these phenomena were as such the world
we are born in, where we live and die.
Whereas Nagarjuna, like all other Indian Buddhist
teachers and scholars, is saying that one should
detach oneself from conditioned things –
phenomena – because they are empty of being,
Nishida is saying that one should abide in the
phenomenal world, because this is precisely where
emptiness is – in the phenomena. The contrast
between the two positions goes way beyond
Sudden shower over Shin-Ohashi Nagarjuna and Nishida: it is a contrast between two
bridge and Atake – Hiroshige (1797-
cultural zones, the Indian sub-continent, still
1858)
influenced by Indo-European onto-metaphysical
thought, focused on being, and the Far-East, which had escaped that
influence, and remained alert to change.
Western Being and Eastern Nothingness
Around the time Nishida was elaborating his doctrine of self-contradictory

identity, he wrote an essay entitled “The forms of ancient cultures, East and
West, seen from a metaphysical perspective” where he contrasted Western
culture as “sustained by Being.” In contrast, Oriental – and especially
Japanese – culture is sustained by “the determination of Nothingness.”
(Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy – An Intellectual Biography of Nishida
Kitaro, 260) Though Nishida’s views are a lot more complex that this clear-
cut statement could lead us to believe, this view has been in one form or
another shared by all the philosophers of the Kyoto School.
Most Western students of Buddhism are not fully aware of the

extent to which Buddhism evolved as it spread from India into
China, Tibet, Japan, as well as Korea. In

Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-
China-Tibet-Japan (1964), Nakamura Hajime
shows how each indigenous tradition
reinterpreted the received teachings in the
light of its own cultural insights to the point
that they came to appear to mean nearly the
opposite, while, at the same time, perhaps
being closer to the original teaching of the
Buddha. Nakamura even speaks of deliberate
mistranslations of Chinese into Japanese. As an
example, Dogen is said to have willfully mistranslated “all beings have the
Buddha nature” into “all beings are the Buddha nature,” arguing that the
Chinese having no word for “to be,” the Chinese word meaning “to have” also
meant “to be.”
Thus Nakamura states: “In the first place, we should

notice that the Japanese are willing to accept the
phenomenal world as Absolute because of their
disposition to lay a greater emphasis upon intuitive
sensible concrete events, rather than upon universals.
This way of thinking with emphasis upon the fluid,
arresting character of observed events regards the
phenomenal world itself as Absolute and rejects the
recognition of anything existing over and above the
phenomenal world. What is widely known among
post-Meiji philosophers of the last century as the
Dogen (1200-1253)
‘theory that the phenomenal is actually the real’
has a deep root in Japanese tradition.” (Nakamura Hajime, Ways of
Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-China-Tibet-Japan, 350)
Joseph Campbell summed up the respective positions of India and the Far
East as follows: “All is illusion: let it go, and “all is in order, let it come” In
India, enlightenment (samadhi) with the eyes closed, in Japan,
enlightenment (satori) with the eyes open. The word moksa (release) has
been applied to both, but they are not the same.” (Joseph Campbell, The
Masks of God – Oriental Mythology, 30-31)
Phenomena, seen as illusory forms in India, concealing the really real which
is either Brahman (Being) in Vedanta, or emptiness in Buddhism, are seen in
the Far East as the very locus of the really real lived as the emptiness of
phenomena. Why the difference? India speaks in terms of knowledge, the
word “illusory” is key here. For Indians, the really real is the substrate, not
the thing we see, which is just a shape: the Upanishad say, clay is the really
real, things made of clay are only illusory shapes. The Far East, on the other
hand, apprehends reality in terms of experience, the world is perfect as it is, it
manifests in the present moment as a presence (whatever knowledge we
extract from it is useful but secondary to the experience of its presence).
Greek philosophy took yet another path: it saw “form,” which it called the
“name” or the “Idea” or the concept as “Being,” so it was not illusory, as the
Indians saw it, but it was still bound to an equation between the really real
and what is beyond change, the noumenal, the fixed, the eternal. The Greeks
stated that nothingness, by definition, could not exist, which implied that the
world was “full” (of being), and it was represented as a full sphere.
Because he was a Buddhist living in India, Nagarjuna was keenly aware of the
danger of ontologising sunyata (emptiness), the empty twin of the Vedantic
Brahman (or Atman). Candrakirti – a disciple of Nagarjuna in 7th century –
“compared the mistake of reifying emptiness with the example of a person
who, upon being told that a merchant had nothing to sell, asks if he can buy
some of that nothing.” (Candrakirti Prasannapada, quoted by Richard King –
Indian Philosophy, 121) It is said that emptiness itself has to be emptied.
Hence the Madhyamikas discuss what they call the “emptiness of emptiness.”
Yet Nagarjuna never went as far as saying, as Nishitani, a disciple of Nishida,
later said: “The elemental mode of being, as such, is illusory appearance. And
things themselves, as such, are phenomena. Consequently, when we speak of
illusory appearance, we do not mean that there are real beings in addition
that merely happen to adopt illusory guises to appear in. Precisely because
it is appearance, and not something that appears, this appearance
is illusory at the elemental level in its very reality, and real in its
very illusoriness.” (Nishitani, Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, 129)
Indian Sunyata and Chinese Wu (Japanese Mu)
Nagarjuna could not have said that to realise sunyata is to accept the
phenomenal as the absolute, as it is in the phenomenal that one finds a direct
experience of emptiness. For Nagarjuna sunyata remained an
epistemogological emptiness, it never became the embodied experience of the
Chinese wu (mu in Japanese). Nagarjuna’s solution was the doctrine of the
two truths. The distinction between ultimate and conventional truths was
meant to “circumvent the dangers of adopting a nihilistic position. Emptiness
… is not mere nothingness, but is another way of declaring the mutual
relativity of all things!” (Richard King, Indian Philosophy,123)
Only the ontological West – including India –, which cannot help seeing
nothingness in a negative way, can risk falling into nihilism. For the East,
ultimate reality is change. It arises as transient phenomenal forms out of “the
Great Mother Dao, empty yet inexhaustible,” (Daodejing Chapter 6 translated
by Stephen Mitchell). The philosophical translation of the same verse by
Roger T Ames and David L Hall, says: “The life-force of the valley never dies
– this is called the dark female. The gateway of the dark female – This is
called the root of the world.” (A Philosophical Translation, Dao De Jing,
“Making Life Significant,” 85). “Dao” refers both to a hollow space as the
source and the process of unfolding of

phenomena in the present moment: it is
nothingness as the “mode” or root-process of
reality. Without nothingness, nothing could
change, nothing could “be.”
Nishida stands squarely in that Eastern

standpoint ‘that the phenomenal is actually the
real’ when he says: “This world of historical
reality, wherein we are born, act and die, must
be, when logically seen, something like the
contradictory self-identity of the many and the In mythology, Wu/Dao/nothingness was
one.” (Nishida Kitaro, Collected Works – quoted apprehended as the Queen Mother of the
by Michiko Yusa in her PhD Dissertation, 223) West – Earthenware circa 2nd century,
Eastern Han Dynasty
What Nishida is saying is not simply that the real
is the historical (or phenomenal) in the sense a secular Western philosopher
rejecting religion would take it. What he is saying is, in symbolic
representation, that “A is A, and yet A is not-A, therefore A is A.” (Carter, The
Nothingness Beyond God, 62) This is what Nishida calls the “logic of soku or
soku hi. A is “what” a thing is as an object in ordinary consciousness. Yet A is
just a name, a concept, a “cutting out of the “aboriginal sensible muchness”
(William James, see Carter, 4) carried out for pratical purposes, so it is not a
solid entity with “own being.” But it is precisely because it is not a solid entity,
and because it is, as Carter says, “lined with nothingness” that it is, as a
presence, a thing “that” is. And what it means is that unless we realise the
standpoint of no-self, we never allow things to be really present to us, we keep
on running after “what” they are because we never see “that” they are, never
“real-ise” them, make them real for us.
The Great Torii of Miyajima
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SELF-CONTRADICTORY IDENTITY – THE LOGIC OF SOKU – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*51
SELF-CONTRADICTORY
IDENTITY – THE LOGIC
OF SOKU
The Great Wave off Kanagawa – Hokusai (1760-1849)
“This world of historical reality, wherein we are born, act and die, must be,
when logically seen, something like the contradictory self-identity of the
many and the one. I have come to this point after many years of pondering.”
(Nishida Kitaro Collected Works, quoted by Michiko Yusa in her PhD
Dissertation)
Troubled times
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Yusa notes that “the contours of Nishida’s dialectical philosophy began to

emerge” in a lecture he gave in November 1934, where he stated that the
actual world is the world “where we are born, work, and die,” and that this
world is “the many as the self-negation of the One, and it is the One as the
self-negation of the many.” (Nishida Kitaro, “The logical structure of the
actual world,” lecture delivered at Otani University in Nov. 1934 quoted by
Michiko Yusa in Zen and Philosophy – An Intellectual Biography of Nishida
Kitaro, 256)
Nationalism and militarism were then

on the rise in Japan as they were in
Germany and in most leading nations.
Japan had launched in 1931 the series of
attacks which led to the Second Sino-
Japanese war in 1937. Japan had been at
war for many years already, first with
Russia, and then China during the First
Flag of the Japanese Imperial Army
Sino-Japanese War. But the situation
was becoming increasingly volatile. There was talk of a “Holy War” against
China. The year 1933 had seen the burning of books by the Nazis in Berlin.
Though Nishida, who had retired from the university in 1928, had entered a
happier period of his life, following his remarriage and move to Kamakura, he
was still active in the academic world, and observed with great concern the
attempts by reactionary forces to impose a nationalist ideology on the
country, and in particular on the young through the education system. But, as
Yusa notes, “as he saw cultural suppression by brutal political forces, he
strengthened his conviction that the contribution he could make as a thinker
was in the area of pure philosophical inquiry. The more insane the world
grew, the clearer his mission became.” (Yusa, Zen and Philosophy, 256)
Yusa notes that it is on New Year’s day 1934 that Nishida wrote his famous
waka, now inscribed on a monument on the “philosopher’s path” where

Nishida used to take walks when he lived in Kyoto: “People are people, I am I,
Unperturbed, I take the path I take.” (Ibid, 257)
Though Nishida describes himself as

“unperturbed,” it is difficult not to see in
the tragic events which unfolded at the
time a strong invitation to take Zen out
of the monastery, and turn it into a path
for people involved in the “real world” –
what he calls “the world of historical
reality.” The Buddha had enjoined his
disciples to “go forth from home into
homelessness” or later, into a
monastery, which required cutting ties
Tenth ox-herding picture – Return to Society with society. Though in China, the last of
the “Ten Oxherding Pictures” shows the
enlightened “herder” returning to the city, Buddhism, even in the Far East,
has focused on the training of disciples eager to attain enlightenment, and
generally not done much to prepare its enlightened disciples to become
involved in the outside world. One step, however, had been taken in that
direction when the Far East, and especially Japan, had reinterpreted the
concept of emptiness, and equated it with the world of change, thus regarding
the phenomenal world as the real world, and not as a world of illusion as it
had been taken to be in India. It is clear that from the real world as
“phenomenal” to the real world as “historical” is but a step, which Nishida
took, as the dark clouds of war were gathering over his head …
Self-contradictory identity
Zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu is here translated as “self-contradictory identity,”
but it has also been rendered as the “unity of opposites,” “contradictory self-
identity,” “self-identity of contradiction,” “identity of contradiction,” and
“contradictory identity.” (Robert E Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 61)
Zettai, means absolutely, mujunteki, contradictory, jiko, self, and doitsu,
identity. The phrase has also been translated as “the self-identity of absolute
contradictories.”
Carter explains: “The one is self-contradictorily composed of the

many, and the many are self-contradictorily one. The world can be
viewed in two directions – the double aperture – and its unity is
not the unity of oneness, as the mystic would likely express it, but
the unity of self-contradiction. It is both one and many; changing and
unchanging; past and future in the present. Nishida’s dialectic has as its aim
the preservation of the contradictory terms, yet as a unity … This is the
logic of soku, or sokuhi – the absolute identification of the is, and
the is not. In symbolic representation: A is A; A is not-A; therefore
A is A. I see the mountains. I see that there are no mountains. Therefore I
see the mountains again, but as transformed. And the transformation is that
the mountains both are and are not mountains. That is their reality.” (Carter,
Ibid, 58)
Carter is here referring to the well-known epigram by the Chinese master

Qingyuan Weixin (9th century):
Tama river in the Musashi province, from the Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji – Hokusai (1760-1849)
Thirty years ago, before I began the study of Zen, I said, ‘Mountains are
mountains, waters are waters.’
After I got an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good
master, I said, ‘Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters.’
But now, having attained the abode of final rest [that is, Awakening], I say,
“Mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters.’
(Translated by Masao Abe, Zen and Western Thought, 4)
In the first line mountains and waters are taken to be solid entities, “objects”
existing outside oneself with a being of their own. This is the view of ordinary
consciousness, where A is A.
The second line reflects the Buddha’s doctrine of anatman, meaning “no own
being,” whereby one understands that mountains and waters are only names
which have been “pinned” onto reality, as signs, they are “historical” forms
projected on reality by human culture. A student of Western philosophy can
reach the same conclusion by reading Kant who holds that our perception of
reality is necessarily shaped by the structures of our minds. So A is not A.
Having attained awakening, in the third line, one has accepted the fact of the
unreality of mountains and waters as abstract concepts empty of own being,
historically generated forms, and one has, as it were, taken these on board
thoughout one’s life. One has, therefore, fully realised the true nature of the
things of the world as perceived: that is, the real is the phenomenal, the real is
real in its unreality. A is really A.
“The mountains that one once saw in a straightforward and ordinary way
were then lost in the identity of nothingness in which all differentiation gives
way to the indifferentiated sameness, only to be recast (emptied) such that
the mountains again seen are now seen differently because they are 1) freed
from old habits of understanding, 2) seen in and for themselves, and 3) lined
with the depths of nothingness … now one sees if “as-it-is-by-itself,” in its
“thusness.” One’s “no-mindedness” has allowed nature to “nature.” (Carter,
The Nothingness Beyond God, 75) Natura naturans.
Even though, line 3 – A is really A – appears to come back to line 1 – A is A –

the way the mountains are seen in line 3 is radically different, because it
includes not only the understanding that mountains are arbitrary forms, but
it overcomes the ordinary duality of the really real and the illusory
appearance by asserting that the mountains are really real because they are,
in a sense, illusory, empty of being, a name which has been, as it were, added
by humans. The “A is A” of line 1 is the ontological standpoint of “object
logic.” The “A is really A” in line 3 is the standpoint of absolute nothingness.
Self-contradictory identity is the standpoint where one sees reality as “lined
with the depths of nothingness,” real in its very unreality, or as Buddhism

says, “in its thusness.”
“Everything is change, or impermanence, says the Buddhist, and yet it is

precisely as change that persons and things are what they are.” (Carter, Ibid,
59) To be sure, this was the view Chinese culture referred to as Dao, where
life emerged out of the empty Dao and flowed through the many phenomenal
forms of the ten thousand things. For the Chinese, such a view may not have
appeared paradoxical, because the notion that “the One is two” is natural. It is
yin and yang, not just as energetic metaphors, but as containing each other,
since each thing is both yin and yang, in various proportions, with the ability
to mutate into the other, in a sort of dance. The Daodejing is in many ways a
“celebration of the fecundity of emptiness.” (Roger T Ames and David L Hall,
A Philosophical Translation Dao De Jing “Making This Life Significant,” 86)
It is only when one tries to reformulate the process using terms borrowed
from the Western logic of identity that one finds oneself dealing with
contradictories.
“The real is, in itself (as we know it) contradictory … What made coming to
this insight so arduous is the fact that Nishida had to reject both the
perspective of ordinary logic, which seeks to eliminate paradox – i.e., which
takes the law of non-contradiction as its emblem (either a thing is, or is not) –
and the perspective of dialectic, which eliminates paradox and contradiction
in a single whole or oneness. What Nishida struggled for was a different
perspective which could embrace both the thesis and the antithesis, the
subject and the object, without suppressing either. The real, phenomenal
world is both one and many, subjective and objective, changing and
unchanging. Reality is self-contradictory.” (Carter, The Nothingness Beyond
God, 62)
Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction states that a thing cannot both “be”
and “not be.” Hegel’s dialectic contends that knowledge emerges out of a
thesis followed by an antithesis negating the thesis – that is, through
contradictory statements – whose contradiction is, as if were, “overcome” by
a synthesis which erases the contradiction, thereby abolishing the tension.
Both Aristotle and Hegel approached reality from the standpoint of objective
logic, the view from the ego-centred consciousness which posits the world as
“out there” somewhere in front of us, reflecting itself in our consciousness.
Nishida had to transcend these to describe reality as seen by the egoless
“empty” consciousness, which he equated with the field of basho or absolute
nothingness, as he went deeper into the process through which reality
emerges through our consciousness – the very process of natura naturans.
What “I” see as “I” is a field of consciousness where the formless self-
determines as the world of forms. Most significantly, Nishida was careful not
to merge the One and the Many, which would have abolished the tension by
stating, as most religious philosophies do, that the Many are absorbed into
the One, often the Creator God, or, in India, Brahman/Atman. The One and
the Many remain in dialectical tension to the end, as two relatives which are
at the same time two absolutes. It is in that sense that self-contradictory
identity includes the seldom translated zettai (absolute) which does appears,
however, in “the real is the self-identity of absolute contradictories.” “For
Nishida, the real is no less one than it is many, no less different than it is
identical.” (Carter, Ibid, 61)
“Nishida’s strength is that he did not try to resolve the contradictions of

experience, but saw them as inescapable descriptions of the way the world is,
as it is known by us. The result is not a synthesis, but a unity-in-
contradiction, a unity of opposites.” (Robert E Carter, The Kyoto School, 45)
Thus Nishida moved from the traditional western logic of either/or, to a
both/and logic. “We both live, and at the same time we are dying; or again,
everything is what it is, and yet is lined with nothingness; a thing is distinctly
what it is, and yet it is (a part of) the One.” (Carter, Ibid, 45) Though this does
not seem to be explicitly stated, the move from the either/or to the both/and
logic reflects contrasting existential encounters with reality. Either/or, as it
attempts to “kill the tension” through a clearcut choice, is a bid at controlling
nature and others by reifying change into an order which one can manage
more easily, whereas both/and, as it accepts the tension, reflects a more
liberal attitude prepared to engage with a dynamic unfolding of life.
The spiral-like path of change as the dialectical path of history
The last years of Nishida’s philosophical career were spent exploring what
this engagement with the world means. “In his 1939 essay, “The World as
Identity of Absolute Contradiction,” Nishida applies his notion of
contradictory identity to the historical world. As centres of self-
consciousness, we encounter a vast array of things which constitute our
environment. We, as self-conscious determiners, interact with our
environment such that we have influence on it – transform it – and are
transformed by it.” (Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 67-68). There is a
dialectical process at work whereby we are at once conditioned by our
environment as we seek to understand it through the use of concepts, but we
can, and we should, revise this interpretation through a return to experience,
thereby creating a new understanding of the world. “We are determined
by the world, and yet we ourselves determine the world. This
important mutuality must not be lost sight of, for we are not
victims, but creators … we are created by our inheritance and our
environment, and yet, we also are capable of re-shaping our environment and
of altering our inheritance both for ourselves, and for our offspring. We are
shaped, and we shape; are conditioned, and yet condition; are determined by
our facticity, and yet are radically free to influence and re-create our world.
Our existential situation allows us a spiral-like path of change: on the one
hand, we are brought back to earth again and again by our factual
circumstances, and on the other, we are able to take flight into the thin air of
the possible, the creative, the better, and the ideal through the freedom to
imagine another set of circumstances, and to so act as to bring these into
existence.” (Carter, Encounters with Enlightenment – A Study of Japanese
Ethics, 169). This spiral-like path of change is, for Nishida, the dialectical
path of history.
Coryellʼs Ferry – Joseph Pickett
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GOD AND NOTHINGNESS – THE FORM OF THE FORMLESS – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*52
GOD AND NOTHINGNESS – THE

FORM OF THE FORMLESS
Bamboo in the Four Seasons – Attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu (1434-1525) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
City)
“Nothingness is the lining of the kimono, known only by the very way in
which the kimono hangs, and holds its shape. One sees the lining by not
seeing it, but by reading its nature from the hang of the formed kimono. This
is the form of formless. The double aperture consists in the ability to read the
nature of the lining from the shape or hang of the kimono; one reads the
nature of the formless from the formed. To see both is to have penetrated to
the identity of the lining of all that exists, as it is manifested in the uniquely
individualized manifold of being. Beings are enveloped by nothingness – the
universal of universals.” (Robert E Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, p
98)
Part II of An Inquiry into the Good – Reality – ends with a discussion on
https://thekyotoschoolofphilosophy.wordpress.com/god-and-nothingness-the-form-of-the-formless/ Page 1 of 12
God. Expecting his Japanese readers to be puzzled by his frequent use of the
word God, Nishida clarifies what he means in Chapter 14 – entitled “God as
Reality.” Having noted that all cultures have a word for God, he observes that
most people “conceive of God as something like a great human who stands
outside the universe and controls it” and asserts that “this notion of God is
extremely infantile.” (Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, 80). Well,
you may not think he is sitting on a cloud, but aren’t most people still looking
up when talking about God?
The Judaeo-Christian conception of

God as outside the world he created,
with the corollary that he is
ontologically different from the beings
he created, arose as a reply to the
question as to how the world came
about: God is seen to be “the cause of the world.” But then, shouldn’t we ask:
what is the cause of God? And if we instead decide that God is without a
cause, we could just as well say that the world is without a cause, it has no
beginning, it has always been and will always be. “If we seek God in the facts
of the external world, God must inescapably be a hypothetical God. Further, a
God set up outside the universe as a creator or overseer of the universe
cannot be deemed a true, absolutely infinite God. The religion of India of the
distant past and the mysticism that flourished in Europe in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries sought God in intuition realized in the inner soul, and this
I consider to be the deepest knowledge of God.” (Nishida, Ibid, 81)
The infinite unifying power of reality latent in us
In Nishida’s eyes, any theory attempting to prove the existence of God

“indirectly from without” fails to prove God “immediately in the direct
experience of the self”. He then asks: “How can we verify the existence
of God in facts of our direct experience? An infinite power is

hidden even in our small chests that are restricted by time and
space; the infinite unifying power of reality is latent in us …. The
infinitely free activity of the human heart proves God directly. As
Jakob Boehme said, we see God with a “reversed eye” (umgewandtes Auge).”
(Nishida, Ibid, 81)
When he looks within, Nishida sees God as “infinite power,” and he calls this
power, “the infinite unifying power of reality” present in our heart, and this
“infinitely free activity of the human heart” is the experiential evidence of
God’s presence, or rather, God’s activity, within us. This is what is usually
called “spirit” in both East and West, the inner sense of being moved from
within to love and act, as if borne by a sort of energetic flow sustaining our
lives. In the West mystics tend to see spirit as coming from a transcendent
God, in the East it is seen as the source of life and the “ten thousand things.”
It infuses and sustains all things, animate and inanimate. Nishida says it is
the base of reality. It is close to the Chinese notion of Dao as both source and
flow of energy, a reminder that Buddhism, especially that of Chan/Zen
schools, absorbed Daoist insights which it found congenial to its own.
“Anyone who deeply comprehends nature discerns a spiritual unity at its

base. Moreover, complete, true spirit is united with nature … It is an
independent, self-fulfilled, infinite activity. We call the base of this infinite
activity God. God is not something that transcends reality, God is the
base of reality. God is that which dissolves the distinction between
subjectivity and objectivity and unites spirit and nature.” (Nishida, Ibid, 79)
Nishida then asks: “In what forms does God exist? From one perspective
… God is all negation, whereas that which can be affirmed or grasped is
not God … From this standpoint, God is absolute nothingness. God is
not, however, mere nothingness. An immovable unifying activity
clearly functions at the base of the establishment of reality, and it

is by means of this activity that reality is established … God is …
the unifier of the universe, the base of reality; and because God is no-
thing, there is no place where God is not, and no place where God does not
function.” (Nishida, Ibid, 81).
Nishida’s entire philosophical career could be described as an inquiry into

nothingness, which he first approached through what to a Western reader is a
non-religious discussion on being. This led him to the concept of basho, seen
as a logical nothingness – the nothingness of the universal of which all beings
are instantiations and specifications. – for example, the nothingness of the
universal called colour, which is no particular colour, and makes it possible
for there being all colours as specifications. Whenever I contrast two “things,”
– for example, a mountain and a hill – I, at the same time, grasp the empty
universal which unites them – here, an elevation in the landscape – which is
like an “empty box” where I can put other types of elevations – massif, ridge,
peak, mound, mount, tor, tump, rise, knoll, etc. God could be seen as the sum
total of all these empty boxes, the ultimate empty box containing all the
differentiations – or contradictories. In other words, God is the universal of
universals, the unifying activity through which differentiated reality is
established, the nothingness enveloping all things.
The Judaeo-Christian God, who is seen as a Higher Being, and a Creator

separated from his creation by an ontological gap, cannot be part of
philosophy. He is deemed to be part of a supra-sensory metaphysical world
beyond the reach of our intellect. Kant asserted that noumena were
unknowable, philosophy could only deal with phenomena. For Nishida, and
the Far East in general, God as nothingness can be said to be the “logical”
nothingness at the root of phenomena. And this “logical” nothingness is
continuous with the “religious” (existential) nothingness, in the sense that
only an empty self can allow phenomena to manifest undistorted by bias.
Both are to be apprehended through direct experience. For

Nishida there is only a difference of degree between
William James’s and Henri Bergson’s experiential and
intuitive apprehension of reality, and the turning inward of
the Advaitic jnani and the Christian mystic – the latter is
deeper because embraced from the standpoint of a fully
realised selflessness, whereas the former is encountered by
a spiritually untrained observer who is still struggling to
achieve a genuinely pure experience. In his last work, “The
Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious
Worldview” written only a few months before his death in
Birds – Hiroshige (1797- June 1945, Nishida states that “religion” (which one could
1858)
define as the religious practice leading to the realisation of
no-mind) – envelops philosophy, though both are, for Nishida, rooted in
nothingness.
“Feeling is a more subtle and delicate form of consciousness

than conceptual knowledge.”
How, then, are we to grasp God as nothingness?

More precisely, a nothingness that is not “mere
nothingness,” but also “an immovable unifying
activity,” as Nishida states above. We already know
the answer: through “pure experience.” But in the
context of religion, this direct experiential grasp
manifests as feeling, because we are not here
merely addressing the practical side of our
Wind Blown Across the Moon –
everyday lives: we are now trying to make sense of Hiroshige (1797-1858) (Brooklyn
the world as such, our place in it, and how best to Museum)
live meaningfully, so we need to embrace reality with our whole selves,
starting with the heart, i.e., the affective, emotional, dynamic, energetic
principle within us. Direct experience then takes the form of “feeling.” “It is a
common idea that feeling differs from knowledge, and that its content is less
clear … The alleged unclarity of feeling means nothing more than that it
cannot be expressed in conceptual knowledge. It is not that
consciousness in feeling is unclear, but rather that feeling is a
more subtle and delicate form of consciousness than conceptual
knowledge.” (Nishida “Affective Feeling” Analecta Husserliana, quoted by
Robert E Carter in The Nothingness Beyond God, 83)
Carter explains: “For Nishida, feeling is what is left when we

imaginatively remove all content from consciousness, for when we
do so we are left with “personal unity, the content of which is precisely that of
feeling … It is revealed when the self is merged with its activity, and all
qualities disappear in one undifferentiated awareness itself” (Nishida,
“Affective feeling” Ibid, 84) We find here a similar procedure to that
described in the Inquiry as pure experience. One is to return to pure
awareness without losing one’s clarity of mind, which is the very goal of the
Zen meditator. In the end there is just awareness, without anyone being
aware, or anything one is aware of. And this “just awareness” is the Buddha
(or God), it is the mind, and the self as aperture or opening.
“Thus it is that the Buddha is your own mind, and your mind gives way to
your self as the place or focus of all things/experiences. Your self, as pure
experience, is an undifferentiated place (Nishida’s basho) or arena where all
things arise, except that it is not a place or arena, but an aperture or opening
… To try to characterize it as anything more than an aperture or dynamic
place is to lose it. It is nothing …It is formless. And the only route to an
understanding of this formlessness is by the direct experience of its grasping
of the myriad of forms. The awareness of forms reveals beneath these forms
the formless which makes the awareness of forms possible … This self can
never become a subject of consciousness, i.e., an object, but is … nevertheless,
glimpsed as an awareness, as a feeling, that is, as a unity of discrete acts of

awareness, or as awareness itself. … It is self revealing.” (Carter, The
Nothingness Beyond God, 84)
Whereas in the philosophical West the focus would be on the characterization

as the clarity of form obtained under the sharp eye of consciousness, the onus
here is on the feeling preceding that characterization, the intuitive in-sight
which, as it were, tunes into concrete reality in order to unveil, rather than
the content of the revelation. That is so because in a world of change, one
has to again and again reconnect intuitively with concrete reality.
Whatever view is attained cannot, and should not, be adopted as a set
narrative, settled upon once and for all, to lead one’s life. Any view one
becomes attached to becomes dogma, ideology, and a recipe for disaster …
since it was never meant to be more that a truth glimpsed at a particular time,
in a particular set of circumstances. What each of us needs to learn is
not how to successfully argue to support that particular view, but
to be able to return to concrete reality, and ascertain whether the
view is still valid or needs to be modified or dropped. To do this, one is to
use pure experience, or “feeling,” in the sense of “a more subtle
and delicate form of consciousness” which is the same as realising
no-mind and turning one’s self into pure awareness. “The path to an
understanding of nothingness, then, is the nothingness of pure experience,
i.e., the self as pure awareness.” (Carter, Ibid, 85).
Dogen’s well-known verses may help understand the process:

To study the Way is to study the self
To study the self is to forget the self
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things
To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one’s self
and others.
(Genjokoan)
To know things as they are, that is, empty of own being, one must turn
inwards and look at one’s own self. As one’s own self is also empty of own
being, all that one sees is emptiness, which in psychological terms would be
called “forgetting one’s self” by dissolving one’s sense of ego. To forget the self
is to become pure awareness, allowing things to advance towards one’s self –
instead of trying to convey one’s self to them – and being enlightened by all
things. One can also say that one is “actualized” by all things. As this takes
place, barriers between one’s self and others break down. As one empties
one’s self, one becomes all things, and one envelops all things and all beings
in an embrace of love. One could say that love – or feeling – is the energetic
aspect of emptiness, both in the universe where life as a dynamic flow
presupposes a nothingness able to take the many forms which the dynamic
flow manifests, and in one’s self where, as I become self-less, I become
everything, and love as benevolence and compassion sustains my life.
Nishitani wrote, in the same vein, that “in religious Love or Compassion, the
highest standpoint of all comes into view.” (Nishitani Keiji, Religion and
Nothingness, 281)
It is difficult for a Western reader to really grasp the idea that nothingness is
not just the absence of being (which implies that there is not much it can do
since it does not really exist!), but an activity, which is both the inner activity
of feeling and the activity of manifestation into the world of forms. To really
grasp it, one has to experience it, that is, to realise no-self: this involves
meditation practice, of course, but more importantly it requires that one is
really prepared to drop one’s self in one’s everyday life, a move which is closer
to a loosening up than to a heroic breaking down of the ego!
Japanese rock and sand garden
“Nothingness is found underfoot, as it were, as the ground of everything in

the everyday world … Nothingness … is the condition of the possibility of
everything. But not only is it the condition of the possibility of everything, it is
only knowable in the phenomenal world of experience as every thing. Each
and every thing is an expression of (a manifestation of, a self-determination
of) nothingness itself. The phenomenally real is not a creation separate from
the creator, nor is it simply made in the image of the absolute. Rather, it is the
absolute, expressed as the absolute expresses itself, phenomenally.
Everything “is” the forms of the undivided, the formless … Nothingness is
revealed in experience, but only when one is able to look through the forms at
the formless of which the forms are expressions. To view a Zen garden of
sand, and to see the mounds and ripples as things-in-themselves, rather than
as temporary forms of the underlying oneness of sand, is to miss the point.”
(Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 86-87)
Things as forms not only point to the nothingness of ultimate reality of which
they are manifestations, or expressions – in logical terms, specifications or
instantiations – but they themselves are nothingness, so they are at the same
time relative as determinated by nothingness, and absolute as nothingness
themselves. This is soku hi, “the absolute identification of the is, and the is
not.” (Carter, Ibid, 58)
Unlike a God understood in substantial terms as a

being, “nothingness does not create the world as
forms, but is the world of forms, for forms are the
self—expressions of, and thereby the self-revelations
of, the formless … no special revelation or moment
is privileged, for “every single moment of infinite
time has the solemn gravity that these privileged
moments possess in Christianity.” (Nishitani,
quoted by Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness,
111). The secular has taken on the fabric of the
sacred, and to use that fruitful image of Nishida’s …
it is like the deep and precious pure silk lining of a Man in a Kimono – Portrait in
Memory of Hiroshige by Kunisada
Japanese kimono: It is the unseen and rarely
glimpsed which gives shape and ultimate meaning to the whole. The
connoisseur alone realises the importance of the lining, while also
recognizing that the value of the lining is best revealed by paying attention to
the shape and color of the outer form of the kimono …” Ultimate Reality “is
the place, itself without characteristics, ouf of which all things with
characteristics arise. Nothingness is God’s face, your face, and my face before
any of us were born – that is, before we were individuated.” (Carter, The
Nothingness Beyond God, 88)
The image of the ripples in the Zen garden of sand and that of the kimono
point in the same direction as the epigram quoted in the text on Self-
Contradictory Identity. In ordinary consciousness, mountains are mountains,
waters are waters. After a short period of study, one sees that mountains are
no longer mountains, waters are no longer waters: they are only names.
When attaining enlightenment, one sees that mountains are again mountains,
waters are again waters, but in a different way: one now sees them as “lined
with the depths of nothingness” (Carter, Ibid, 75) through the double
aperture of being and nothingness, not as two distinct perspectives, but as
two necessarily associated aspects, since being and emptiness as like two
sides of a coin, inseparable. Buddhism says that one sees things in their
suchness, or thusness.
When Nishida speaks about God, he usually means nothingness. Only in

Nishida’s last essay, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious
Wordview,” where he deliberately uses Christian terms, does he, at times,
also use the word in the more restricted sense of “creator.” One can also say
that “Nothingness is beyond God,” as Carter does, taking God in the sense of
the first being arising out of nothingness. This interpretation follows the gist
of Meister Eckhart’s positing of a Godhead as nothingness above, or before,
God as Creator. Eckhart’s thesis is the closest the West got to the notion of
nothingness as source of being. Predictably, the Church quickly suppressed
the idea, Eckhart was accused of heresy, and his sermons were withdrawn
from public circulation. Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis between Aristotle and
Christianity was adopted instead, bringing Christian thought securely under
the yoke of Greek metaphysics.
Tiger in a tropical storm – Henri Rousseau (1844-1910)
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THE SELF-EXPRESSION OF THE WORLD AND THE REALISATION OF THE TRUE SELF – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*53
THE SELF-EXPRESSION OF THE

WORLD AND THE
REALISATION OF THE
TRUE SELF
The Tone River in the Province of Kazusa – Hokusai (1760-1849) — Musée Guimet Paris
In the position I am articulating, the self is to be understood as existing in

that dynamic dimension wherein each existential act of consciousness, as a
self-expressive determination of the world, simultaneously reflects the
world’s self-expression within itself and forms itself through its own self-
https://thekyotoschoolofphilosophy.wordpress.com/the-self-expression-of-the-world-and-the-realisation-of-the-true-self/ Page 1 of 9
expression. (Nishida Kitaro, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the
Religious Worldview,” Last Writings p 64)
“Religious sentiment”
“The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” first
published in Japan in 1949, and later translated into English to form the
main part of Last Writings in 1987, was consciously written by Nishida as an
intellectual “will.” It starts with a presentation of the main threads of
Nishida’s philosophical inquiry before focusing on an articulation of “the
religious worldview,” using Christian as well as Zen language, and showing to
what extent Christianity’s mythological terminology resonates with Zen,
though, when looked at closely, it is bound by “object logic,” and fails to go
beyond the revealed texts to recover religion as experience, more precisely, as
the direct experience of reality from the standpoint of no-self. Such a
standpoint is different from Christian mysticism, which does not see the
union with the divine as a vehicle for any novel insights beyond the
revelations already recorded in the texts. Zen, instead, requires that one
proves whatever one is taught true for oneself, and generally discourages
mere reference to scriptures. It is said that one should “kill the Buddha” –
that is, free oneself of all doctrines.
Starting as ever with a return to experience, Nishida argues that, though not
everyone is an artist, most people can appreciate art, and likewise, though not
everyone is religious, no one can be said to entirely lack an experience of what
he refers to as “religious sentiment.” “I will clarify … what I mean by
religious sentiment … just as color appears to the eye as color, and
sound to the ear as sound, so too God appears to the religious self
as an event of one’s own soul.” (Nishida Kitaro, “The Logic of the Place
of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview” in Last Writings, 48)
Nishida stresses that religion, which is for him, and the East in general, an
experience or, as he says here, a “sentiment,” something you feel inside – “an
event of one’s soul” – cannot be discussed from the standpoint of “object
logic,” as this kind of logic only grasps things from the outside. Since religion
in the West is normally equated with belief in a set of holy texts, i.e., a dogma,
Carter often uses the word “religiosity” to refer to religion as experience, but
for Nishida, using another word would make no sense: for him religion is
experience, belief in a dogma is not religion, it is, in fact, the very opposite of
religion. In fact, Carter adds, “The greatest killer of religiosity is religion”
(Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond God, 161)
“Each individual conscious act is a contradictory identity”
Religion, Nishida says, “arises rather with a consideration of the meaning of

our own consciously active self” (Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings, 49) “God” –
or ultimate reality – can only be apprehended through our consciousness,
more specifically through the activity of our conscious/active living self as it
seemingly gives shape to the world of forms out of the nothingness of
consciousness in the present moment. From 1934 onwards Nishida had
developed a dialectical philosophy whereby the world’s self-expression as the
world of forms takes place within the conscious self through a process of self-
contradictory identity. The world is “the many as the self-negation of the One
and the One as the self-negation of the many.” (Nishida Kitaro, “The logical
structure of the actual world,” lecture delivered at Otani University in Nov.
1934 quoted by Michiko Yusa in Zen and Philosophy – An Intellectual
Biography of Nishida Kitaro, 256)
According to mainstream Western philosophy, which is dominated by

idealism, the forms which emerge out of sensory indifferentiation are either
abstract concepts (Plato’s Ideas) belonging to a higher supra-sensory
metaphysical level, so not accessible to experience, or they are forms (names)
extracted from observed reality (Aristotle), or else, forms reflecting our

minds’ structures (Kant). The assumption made by idealism is that ultimate
reality is substantial – it is “Being.” Consciousness is but a mirror reflecting
“Being” arranged into a coherent order of objects seemingly standing in front
of us.
In the Eastern worldview, ultimate reality is not “Being.” It

is not substance. It is nothingness, originally seen through
the maternal metaphor as a hollow source out of which all
things emerge according to the Way (Dao), i.e., as
complementary pairs of opposites (symbolised by the
expression yin-yang). This nothingness is therefore as
Feminine wave – Hokusai
such dynamic. Traditionally it is the life principle
(1760-1749)
operating in various forms, generative jing, energetic qi
and spiritual shen, which drives change. Translated into philosophical
language, nothingness is the unified field of consciousness, which is
“dynamic” and self-expresses through the “active” conscious self.
Nothingness as such is activity. It is the energy within us, which we
experience as compassion, love, what the Japanese call kokoro, the heart in
the heart-mind. It is also the activity of self-expression whereby forms
emerge out of the formless through the process of self-contradictory identity.
Nishida writes, “I say, then, that the human-historical world exhibits true,
existential individuality through its structure of absolutely contradictory
identity. This ultimately consists in the fact that each individual conscious act
is a contradictory identity. For while the act exists and moves in itself, it
dynamically expresses the world …” (Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings, 51)
“That I am consciously active means that I determine myself by

expressing the world in myself.”
Not only does the world in the present moment self-expresses through the
conscious/active living self, but this act of self-expression of the world is

constitutive of my individual self. There is therefore no loss of my “self” as I
express the world: just the opposite, through expressing the world, I become
a true self.
“When I say that the consciously active

individual exists in a structure of
dynamic expression, I mean precisely
this. That I am consciously active
means that I determine myself by
expressing the world in myself. I
am an expressive monad of the world. I
transform the world into my own
Fresh wind on a clear morning, from the Thirty-six
subjectivity. The world that, in its Views of Mount Fuji – Hokusai (1760-1749)
objectivity, opposes me, is transformed
and grasped symbolically in the forms of my own subjectivity. But this
transactional logic of contradictory identity signifies as well that it is the
world that is expressing itself in me.” (Nishida, Ibid, 52)
In my view, the articulation of the reciprocal relationship between the process

of becoming an individual and the self-expression of the world is one of
Nishida’s key insights, as it makes possible a reconciliation between those
who are still living within a religious context, and those who have left it
behind, and live in a purely materialistic and rational universe. Our world
today is torn between those who deeply distrust all things merely human, and
believe in complying with the injunctions of a higher order. I am not just
referring to Islam which explicitly posits divine law above human law. Many
are those who are suspicious of the long-term benefits of science and
technology. In many ways, self-consciousness seems to have allowed us
humans to play God and “improve” the world, but it may be that we will turn
out to be the proverbial sorcerer’s half-trained apprentice who cannot control
the consequences of his actions. What Nishida is telling us is that what

tradition has called God is not a parental figure to go back to for refuge.
“God” creates the world through us, and there is no escaping a
world shaped by humans. What we can do, though, is transform
our selves into empty fields of consciousness so that the self-
expression of the world is energized by kokoro – compassion,
love, good will, benevolence – and freed from the distortions of
any attachment we may have, so that we can express a correct view
of the way things are. Traditional “believers” can see this as realising the
will of God, and atheist or agnostic humanists can see it as the way to the
realisation of true human individuality. Whatever your position, though, a
transformation of humankind is required, in that we must understand that in
order to be a self, one has to relinquish the self, according to the principle of
self-contradictory identity. It is not “to be or not to be.” It is “not to be in
order to be”!
Nishida writes: “In the position I am articulating, the self is to be understood

as existing in that dynamic dimension wherein each existential act of
consciousness, as a self-expressive determination of the world,
simultaneously reflects the world’s self-expression within itself and forms
itself through its own self-expression.” (Ibid, 64) That the world expresses
itself through my conscious self, which becomes itself as that self-expression,
throws a new light on the ancient debate about free will, whether we have it,
or not, and if we do have it, what does “free will” really means?
New light on the problem of free will
“Past philosophers tend to conceive of the person merely from the standpoint
of the conscious, but abstract, individual. Freedom is then regarded as the
activity of an autonomous self. But even speaking in this way, the self must
act from a certain kind of nature. If it were entirely indeterminate, it could
not act autonomously. It must have a

nature in some sense. Freedom means
to act from one’s own nature, to follow
one’s own nature. Mere arbitrary
behavior is not freedom.” (Nishida, Ibid,
71)
We should not be misled by this notion

of “one’s own nature.” Freedom is not Big Ben – Parliament in London – Emerik Feješ (1904-
1969)
the ability to act arbitrarily. But neither
is it the ability to become oneself in the ordinary sense of realising a sort of
essential nature or inner potential. Nishida confirms that the personal self is
not “an objective substance,” later concluding that “It exists as a dynamic
subjectivity, self-consciously determining itself within itself.” It is
“a vector of the creative historical world. (Nishida, Ibid, p 71-72). As
consciousness, it is nothingness creating the world through self-contradictory
identity, the act whereby the many arise out of the One. So, though it self-
consciously determines itself within itself, at the same time, it receives self-
expression from nothingness, in a way which could be described as the
activity of God. One could say that the self-expression comes from within (no-
self) or that it comes from without (God, as God tends to be seen as being
outside). But of course, as God sustains all things and beings, the activity
he/she represents is also within us.
Not just “lived through” but co-creators and responsible
What we must take away from this is that we are not just “lived through” by
an absolute divine self-expressing through us. As this self-expression
constitutes our selves, we partake in the divine creative activity. The principle
of the identity of self-contradiction applies “to our own participation in, and
our acting upon, the real world. We are determined by the world, and yet we
ourselves determine the world. This important

mutuality must not be lost sight of, for we are
not victims, but creators. From the created to
the creating (from creatus to creans), from the
formed to the forming is how [Nishida]
describes our situation: we are created by our
inheritance and our environment, and yet, we
also are capable of re-shaping our environment
and of altering our inheritance both for
ourselves, and for our offspring. We … are
determined by our facticity, and yet are radically
free to influence and re-create our world. Our The Tree of Life – Séraphine Louis (de
existential situation allows us a spiral-like path Senlis) (1864-1942)
of change: on the one hand, we are brought back to earth again and again by
our factual circumstances, and on the other, we are able to take flight into the
thin air of the possible, the creative, the better, and the ideal through the
freedom to imagine another set of circumstances, and to so act as to bring
these into existence. We are creators of our own destiny, as well as
products of our age, biology, and culture. Nishida describes this
dialectical spiral path as the path of history itself (Robert Carter – Encounter
with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese Ethics, 169). As the conduits for
the self-expression of the world of forms, we are called upon to be
transparent vehicles, combining empathy and clarity of mind, so that the
world is infused with these qualities instead of being torn by greed, hatred,
confrontation, exploitation, and near systematic destruction as is currently
the case.
Deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia
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THERE MUST BE AN OVERTURNING, A RADICAL CONVERSION OF MIND – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*54
THERE MUST BE AN
OVERTURNING, A RADICAL
CONVERSION OF MIND
The field – basho
“There must be an overturning, a radical conversion of mind, in any religion.

Without it there is no religion. I say, therefore, that religion can be
philosophically grasped only by a logic of absolute affirmation through
absolute negation. As the religious self returns to its own bottomless depths,
it returns to the absolute and simultaneously discovers itself in its ordinary
and everyday, and again in its rational, character. As a self-determination of
https://thekyotoschoolofphilosophy.wordpress.com/there-must-be-an-overturning-a-radical-conversion-of-mind/ Page 1 of 12
the absolute present, it discovers its own eschatological character, as a

historical individual.” (Nishida Kitaro, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness
and the Religious Worldview,” Last Writings, 91)
“In any religion, it is the effort of self-negation that is

necessary.”
The one thing that has been most misunderstood about religion is whether
God is outside of us as a higher power who created the world and is still
controlling it, or is really a power within us, which inspires us to love and act
for the benefit of others. There have been those who have feared that any talk
of a God within would mislead some individuals into stating that they “are”
God.
To clarify the dual apprehension of God as both within and without, Nishida
turns to a distinction familiar to anyone living in Japan, that between the way
of other power – tariki – which is that of the Pure Land School, and the way
of self-power – jiriki – which is that of Zen. Nishida asserts that at bottom,
self-power, the Zen approach, is the same as other-power. In fact, he says,
Zen is not really a religion of self-power. He writes: “The religious
consciousness does not arise out of our own selves; it is simultaneously the
call of God or Buddha. It is the working, the operation, of God or Buddha
welling up from the bottomless depths of the soul.” (Nishida Kitaro, “The
Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” Last
Writings, 78) He adds: “Essentially, then, there can be no religion of self-
power. This is indeed a contradictory concept. Buddhists themselves have
been mistaken about it. Although they advocate the concepts of self-
power and other-power respectively, the Zen sect and the True
Pure Land sect, as forms of Mahayana Buddhism, basically hold
the same position … In any religion, it is the effort of self-negation
that is necessary.” (Nishida, Ibid, 80) In the end, Zen cannot be described
as a religion of self power, because it does not rely on the self but on the
negation of the self, like any other religion. What this really means is that the
self becomes itself through negating itself, and it can do so because as no-self,
it is nothingness, and nothingness is the activity of self-determination as the
forms of the world. “The self, we must say, possesses itself through its own
self-negation … At the ground of the self, therefore, there must be that which,
in its own absolute nothingness, is self-determining, and which, in its own
absolute nothingness, is being. I believe this the meaning of the ancient
Buddhist saying, “Because there is No Place in which it abides, the Mind
arises.” (Nishida, Ibid, 82)
Religious life as “constituted in the contradictory identity of

the self and the absolute.”
That the self possesses itself through its own self-negation implies that, at the
ground of the self, or, as Nishida would prefer to say, “in the depths” of the
self, there is nothingness, and nothingness is the activity of self-expression
according to the process of contradictory identity – “the One into the many
and the many into the One.” These depths of the self are bottomless, so there
is really no ground, that is, no place where the self can rest, so it arises as
mind, that is, heart-mind, loving energy and self-determination of the world
of forms. “When I say depths (or ground) I refer to bottomlessly
contradictory identity of existential life. This involves an entirely different
logic – the logic of affirmation through absolute negation.” (Nishida, Ibid, 83)
The logic of affirmation through absolute negation is the logic of the place of
nothingness, and this is the logic at work in the religious worldview. “ This
logic conceives of the religious form of life as constituted in the contradictory
identity of the self and the absolute.” (Nishida, Ibid, 83)
The religious life requires an overturning of the mind whereby the self
negates itself in order to be itself. “There must be an overturning, a
radical conversion of mind, in

any religion. Without it there is
no religion. I say, therefore, that
religion can be philosophically
grasped only by a logic of
absolute affirmation through
absolute negation. As the religious
self returns to its own bottomless
depths, it returns to the absolute and simultaneously discovers itself in its
ordinary and everyday, and again in its rational, character. As a self-
determination of the absolute present, it discovers its own eschatological
character, as a historical individual.”(Nishida, Ibid, 91) As the self negates
itself, it allows the self-determination of the historical world, and this is
what Zen points to when it states that to live a Zen life is to live an
ordinary life. Nishida quotes Lin-chi: “The Buddha-dharma has no special
place to apply effort. It is only the ordinary and everyday; relieving one-self,
donning clothes, eating rice, lying down when tired. The fool laughs at us, but
the wise understand.” (Quoted by Nishida, Ibid, 108) Acts of ordinary living
are as such what Christians would refer to as eschatological, that is, they are
expressions of the absolute. In Zen, however, what this entails is that our own
acts, and not only those performed by Jesus, and perhaps a small elite of
prophets whose prophecies were recorded in the Bible, can be the self-
expression of the historical world. In other words, religious consciousness is
not a special kind of consciousness, as the privileged place given to the
prophets’s sayings in the Bible seems to imply. “But when I speak of religion,
I do not refer to a special kind of consciousness. “There is no mysterious
power in the true Dharma” …. “The true Way cannot exist apart even for an
instant; what can do so is not the true Way” … “When we run, we are on the
true Way, when we stumble and fall, we are still on it.” Religion is not apart
from common experience.” (Nishida, Ibid, 115)
Religion is not a special kind of consciousness
To those who might confuse

enlightenment with some sort of
alternative state of consciousness, one
has to say that it is not a “special kind
of consciousness,” but it nevertheless is
what one could call a self-less self-
consciousness. Carter seems to have
had a similar reaction when he wrote
“Human consciousness is a spectrum
which extends from the unaware and beastly natural, to the enlightened
awareness of kensho as the bottomless identity of contradictories of self as
absolute, of absolute as self. The enlightened is preferable, but all are equally
moments in the divine creation.” (Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness Beyond
God, 154) Doesn’t Nishida state that animals, plants and rocks are also self-
expression of the world? These are conscious too (even rocks) in the sense of
reacting to, as well as impacting, their surroundings. In fact, one could say
they express the world better because they are not hampered by conceptual
representations. It is only in humans that a problem arises, because humans
have self-consciousness, and live their lives surrounded by representations of
the world. People who do not question these representations spend their lives
under the spell of these representations, using them to justifying whatever
they “pick and choose,” and consequently their expression of reality is
distorted by their attachments. Only humans, because of self-consciousness,
require a spiritual practice to return to pure consciousness, to see things as
they are. Paradoxically, Zen practice uses self-consciousness to return to pure
consciousness. Enlightenment could be described as the breakthrough of self-
consciousness by self-less self-consciousness.
Carter thinks that Dogen’s assertion that “training is enlightenment” may
throw light on Nishida’s notion that religion is not a special kind of

consciousness. Carter writes that for Dogen, “To sit in zazen is to be
enlightened. For to take one’s own enlightenment seriously enough to
question one’s present state, and to act in search of a greater realisation is
already to have taken the religious turn … The very act of questing, or
questioning of self, is to have abandoned the complacent, uncritical, and
conventional standpoint that simply assumes that we are who we appear to be
… To put these assumptions in genuine doubt and to undertake the search for
a deeper understanding of one’s own complex nature is the religious act
itself.” (Carter, Ibid, 156) Enlightenment then starts when you first sit on the
cushion, not when you are told that you have “passed” your first kensho, or
when you have achieved satori, which could be understood as having gained
the ability to live in a permanent state of no-mind. The Buddha’s
enlightenment is traditionally described as the insight into co-dependent
origination. That was when the Buddha, having sat all night under the Bodhi
tree, and fought Mara’s temptations, saw clearly that things had no own
being, and arose in dependence upon each other. But for the Buddha and all
Buddhist practitioners, this first insight has to grow into a deep conviction
whereby one’s whole life is permeated with this understanding, when, in
Buddhist language, it becomes “your bones and marrow.” “Then, all
experience is now enlightened. Nothing is taken in its heretofore
unquestioned “objective” sense. All is in flux and yet not in flux, and one is
now able (however infinitesimally at first) to look at and then through all
objects and events of consciousness towards their “lining.” (Carter, Ibid, 157)
From the individual to the collective
That enlightenment is not a special kind of consciousness, achieved by a a few

monastics after years of training, but instead the simple act of doubting that
things are the way they are presented in the conceptual paradigm, allows
Nishida to move to a reflection of the meaning of religion at the level of
society. Having defined religion as the

self-expression of the formless through
all individual self-less self-consciousness
into the world of forms, as a collective
co-expression of the absolute present,
one has to move from a consideration of
the individual to a consideration of the
group. This is when the historical
Pedestrian main street in the Ginza district of Tokyo
dimension comes into itself. Given the
fact that World War II was raging all around Nishida, that Japan was about to
lose the war, and Nishida himself was aware that his life could end soon,
there was no way Nishida could avoid facing the historical dimension.
Nishida was keen to put an end to the traditional Buddhist focus on the
individual and neglect of the social and historical. Nishida states that “a true
nation arises when a people harbors the world-principle within itself and
forms itself historically and socially.” (Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings, 116)
Religion properly understood will help humanity overcome

cultural differences
A clarification of the relationships

between religion, culture, race, and
nation is then necessary, as the received
idea is that religion is often used to
further reify the contrasting identities of
various human groups, and justify
conflicts rather than defuse them.
Nishida notes that all religions originally
arose in a world where human groups Collective sitting meditation as protest
lived apart from each other and
developed their own cultural systems. For this reason, “race” – or, we might
say, ethnic identity – is less a biological fact than a historical fact, meaning
that “difference” is expressed as a clash of cultures. Nishida agrees that,
somehow, difference must be transcended. “A global humanity is formed
when the historical world, as the self-determination of the absolute present,
transcends its racial particularities.” (Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings, 117) But
he disagrees with those, especially in the West, who think that the way to do
this is to jettison religion altogether, and replace it by a strictly secular
worldview. “When mankind, however, maximizes the human
standpoint in a non-religious form, in a purely secular direction,
the result is that the world negates itself and mankind loses itself.
This has been the trend of European culture since the Renaissance, and the
reason that such a thing as the decline and fall of the West has been
proclaimed … The world then becomes mere play or struggle, and the
possibility of a true culture is undermined.” (Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings,
119)
This is not to say that we should go back

to the Middle Ages … The world has
moved into the Renaissance for a
reason. Each epoch must create its own
history. And this creation should be
through the self-determination of the
absolute present, which is a religious act
in the sense that it is the “natural”
Ouarzazate Noor Solar Power Complex in Morocco
process of emergence of the historical
world through the consciousness of all humans. What we now call culture is
the same thing as religion. “A culture is the content of a form forming itself as
a self-determination of the absolute present … I assert, therefore, that a
true culture must be religious, and a true religion must be
cultural.”(Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings, 119)
Immanent transcendence
To be precise, the self-determination of the

absolute present through our individual
consciousness is “natural,” Nishida says
“immanent,” meaning that it is always taking place
whether we have started to “doubt” received ideas,
“overturning” our minds to settle in the standpoint
of the empty self, or whether we still see the world
from the ego-centred standpoint as “objects” for us
to use to satisfy our personal fantasies. As
explained above, it is only when we free ourselves
from attachments and realise self-less self-
consciousness, that we truly transcend mere immanence, and become able to
more genuinely express the formless world. And this is obviously a better way
to generate a healthy global culture. In Nishida’s words: “I thus maintain that
we must proceed by the logic of absolutely contradictory identity –
that is, of transcending immanently. This immanent
transcendence is the road to a new global culture.” (Nishida Kitaro,
Last Writings, 120). “That the self transcends itself in its own immanent
depths does not signify a loss of itself; it rather becomes a unique expression
of the world’s self-expression. It rather signifies that the self becomes truly
individual, a real self. (Nishida Kitaro, Last Writings, 111)
When seen from the standpoint of transcendence, immanence is seen as the

opposite of transcendence, it is that which comes from below whereas
transcendence comes from above. But when seen from the standpoint of
immanence, transcendence is seen as arising out of immanence, as all things
arise from immanence, so transcendence cannot be an exception. All humans
possesses within themselves an aspiration to self-transcendence: the baby is
eager to talk, the toddler is eager to help mother, the child is eager to learn,
even teenagers are eager to make a true contribution! There is no need to

bribe the young with rewards and/or threaten them with punishment to get
them to grow mentally as well as physically.
Nishida writes: “It may be that a new Christian world will begin
through an immanently transcendent Christ.” (Nishida Kitaro, Last
Writings, 121) A century and a half after these words were written, we cannot
say that there is much evidence of this happening. The way of other-power
relies on belief, whereby a person surrenders their will to that of a higher
entity. This was, and still is, the way the shamanic cure operates: the shaman
acts out an encounter with, or an embodiment, of a spirit, who utters the
solution for the problem at hand, and the “patient” believes it instantly, thus
making it possible for them to return to a positive state. Placebos in modern
medicine work in the same way. But few people today have this ability to just
believe! Trying to resurrect it would require that Christianity enhances its
mythological aspects. Those who have tried this approach end up with
gathering in a stadium waiting for the Rapture, as the Christ returns to take
them straight to Heaven!
A relatively small number of Christians calling

themselves Zen Christians appear to follow the
advice the Dalai Lama gave to non-Buddhists who are
attracted to Buddhism – “Do not try to use what you
learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a
better whatever-you-already-are.” Thomas Merton,
an American Trappist monk and hermit led the way
through his exploration of Asian spiritualities. The
relative success of Zen is due to its demythologised
language and its return to experience. The practice of
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
meditation is seen as the path to enlightenment. This
is not incorrect as long as you are able to sufficiently distance yourself from
the instrumental mindset, expecting specific results after so many sittings …

One positive step in the right direction is that practitioners are constantly
invited to check out the truth of the teachings, and make whatever they are
told “true for themselves.” This mimics the scientific approach, even though
to “experience” and to “experiment” are not the same thing. There is also in
Zen an emphasis on doubt which mimics the Western critical mind. There is
however a risk that one gets bogged down into trying to “achieve” the
particular experience called enlightenment. You cannot will yourself to
“forget” the self.
What I believe Nishida has achieved is a philosophical formulation

integrating non-dualism and dualism, whereby dualism, the world of forms,
is but the other aspect of non-dualism, the formless world of absolute
nothingness. The One and the Many are two aspects of the process of self-
contradictory identity.
Nishida’s formulation goes far beyond co-dependent origination which tends

to be interpreted as the interconnectedness of all things, with the corollary
that whatever we do to our environment we in the end do it to ourselves, and
if this is destructive, then we will reap endless suffering. Early humans were
keen to adjust to an environment they could not control, and they perfected
the way of inner transformation. Modern humans have embarked on a
mission to change the world to suit their needs. This is a risky undertaking
which has landed us into a multi-faceted crisis. The more we try to control the
world the less we seem to be actually in control of it, and this is because we
have forgotten the practice of self-control early humans had so perfectly
mastered.
It is easy to see why: when trying to control the world, we tend to look
outwards, forget to keep watch of our desires, and instead use the energy
within these desires to fuel our efforts, so we end up with a never ending list
of needs. It would be otherwise if we started with the overturning, radical

conversion of mind which is the core of the religious approach, realise no-self,
at the same time triggering a surge of empathy whereby we feel as if we were
the world. We are the world inasmuch as we co-create it and it is more a
question of taking care of it than a question of using it to meet our needs. The
world is not a resource to exploit, it is a garden to tend.
Himeji Koko-en Garden
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PURE EXPERIENCE AND INTELLECTUAL INTUITION – The Kyoto School of Philosophy 2017-09-24, 12*50

PURE EXPERIENCE AND

“A true intellectual intuition is the unifying activity in pure experience. It is a

Inquiring into the true reality of the universe from the

When Nishida, against the advice of his

No-mind as a standpoint accessible to all

Nishida, however, avoided any reference to Zen in his philosophical writings

Same doubt as Descartes, but different conclusion: knowledge

William James and Henri Bergson

A big blooming buzzing confusion?

For William James, reality was “a that, an Absolute, a ‘pure’ experience on an

Pure experience includes thinking, thinking and intuition are

James compared concepts with the

“intellectual” to intuition. Whereas in the early stages of Zen meditation, the

Intellectual intuition: ordinary perception is compositional

When Nishida introduces the term “intellectual

Carter says that Nishida’s “intellectual intuition”

“Our most natural, unified state of consciousness”

Awareness beyond the dichotomy of subject and object is not, however, a

Intellectual intuition can be best understood in the context of Nishida’s

which proceeds through the unification of consciousness into a meaningful

For now, as defined in the Inquiry, “A true intellectual intuition is the

THE LOGIC OF BASHO

Fishing boats on a lake – Hiroshige (1797-1858)

The field – basho – is “literally nothing, it is not a being at all,” since as a

As already noted, the problem with Aristotle – and Western thought as a

“To say that one’s glass of wine is red … is to have already

“bought into” the system of wines and their types.”

Just as, in the Inquiry, Nishida stated

must be a certain unifying reality concealed at their base.” (Nishida,

Japanese rock garden

Nishida’s articulation of his field-theory was achieved not through theoretical

Most of us have little difficulty accepting that “form is empty,” as it is enough

Eager to stick to Aristotelian language, Nishida “speaks of this

grammatical subject, but that which grounds both, and 1858)

From anatman/sunyata to wu/mu

For the Chinese, and especially the Daoists,

dualistic ordinary consciousness trying to gain liberation through

Basho as both an (abstract) epistemological universal and a

(concrete) embodied intuition

For Nishida, the field – basho – is

are warned against thinking, they often misunderstand this warning as

As Westerners, we see the world as emerging as a coherent order from a

FROM NAGARJUNA’S MIDDLE

Inter-dependent-origination is what we call ‘emptiness’.

Co-dependent origination = emptiness

Structurally the phrase “self-contradictory identity” is strongly reminiscent of

Co-dependent origination is the doctrine on which Nagarjuna focused to

Inter-dependent-origination is what we call ‘emptiness’.

Carter confirms that Nishida was influenced

absurdities, he could not possibly come up with yet another philosophical

Following David Kalupahana (Nagarjuna: The

most schools of Buddhism.

There are, however, other ways of understanding co-dependent origination.

When looking at co-dependent origination, Nishida did not see it as an

the universal allowed phenomena to arise,

Western Being and Eastern Nothingness

Around the time Nishida was elaborating his doctrine of self-contradictory

Most Western students of Buddhism are not fully aware of the

China, Tibet, Japan, as well as Korea. In

Thus Nakamura states: “In the first place, we should

Indian Sunyata and Chinese Wu (Japanese Mu)

source and the process of unfolding of

Nishida stands squarely in that Eastern