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God and Nothingness

Article  in  Philosophy East and West · January 2009

DOI: 10.1353/pew.0.0042

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GOD AND NOTHINGNESS

Robert E. Carter
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Trent University

I think that we can distinguish the West to have considered being as the ground of reality, the East to have taken
nothingness as its ground. I will call them reality as form and reality as the formless, respectively.
Nishida Kitarō1

[T]hat which is beyond the representation of both ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ is the true nothingness. That which
can in no way be objectified is this ‘nothingness.’
Nishitani Keiji2

Introduction

With the exception of a handful of mystics, the West has not taken the idea of noth-
ingness as either a vital or a positive element in its philosophizing or theologizing.
On the whole, Western philosophers have understood nothingness to be directly re-
lated to being, insofar as nothingness simply stood for the negating of being, as in
Heidegger’s crossed-out being signifying nothingness as negation. Thus it is that
Nishida Kitarō’s somewhat simplistic caricature, which views the West as cultures
of being and the East as cultures of nothingness, seems, on the whole, accurate.
Yet, in the West, Meister Eckhart is something of a paradigm for those few who did
take nothingness to be an important notion in describing the divine nature, and, in
general, it is usually the mystics who come closest to the East in all but eliminating
the gap or boundary between creator and creatures, self and others, and being and
nothingness.
My strategy in this essay, which is essentially about Nishida, is to use Eckhart as
a more familiar entrée into our inquiry into nothingness because he is a Western
thinker, a Christian, and a mystic. What I find remarkable about Eckhart, theological
deviant from the mainstream though he was, is just how similar many of his insights
are to those of Nishida. By comparing these two thinkers, I believe it will be consid-
erably easier to clarify the meaning of ‘‘absolute nothingness.’’ Finally, I will focus
on Ueda Shizuteru, who goes beyond both Eckhart and Nishida by describing Zen
as a ‘‘non-mysticism,’’ which, nevertheless, includes mysticism in its dynamic base.

The Problem of Mysticism

While there is no doubt about labeling Eckhart a mystic, there is considerable doubt
about whether Nishida was a mystic, not the least of which stems from the fact that
he adamantly said he was not. It will be necessary to define ‘‘mysticism’’ and, along
the way, to offer at least a sketchy decision as to whether Nishida’s philosophy is a

Philosophy East & West Volume 59, Number 1 January 2009 1–21 1
> 2009 by University of Hawai‘i Press
 mystical one. James Heisig, in his recent book The Philosophers of Nothingness,
mentions ‘‘mysticism’’ sixteen times and yet never defines or discusses it, nor does
he ask whether or not Nishida Kitarō was in any sense a mystical philosopher. Mys-
ticism is ‘‘the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness
or a One to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate.’’ 3 To be sure, the
meaning of ‘‘unity’’ in this statement is not uniform among the mystical traditions; for
example, most Christian mystics vehemently resist talk of an identity between the
Creator and the created, and instead speak only of a ‘‘union,’’ whereas Daoist,
Hindu, and Buddhist mystics speak of the identity or oneness of all things.
Nishida was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism through his decade of Zen
meditation in monastery settings. His boyhood and lifelong friend, D. T. Suzuki,
who for decades served as the major source of information in the West about Rinzai
Zen, is clear and distinct in his opinion that Zen is not mystical: ‘‘Zen masters are not
mystics and their philosophy is not mysticism.’’ 4 The reason, he tells us, is that while
mysticism in the West begins with the assumption that there is an antithesis—God
and human being—that ends with ‘‘unification or identification,’’ in Zen ‘‘there is
no antithesis, therefore no synthesis or unification.’’ 5 Union, absorption, oneness,
he maintains, are all ideas that develop from a dualistic conception of things. Hence,
it is not that a union takes place, but that oneness has been the state of things all
along, albeit unrecognized for the most part.
To the extent that Western mystics do take a dualistic stance ontologically, then
Suzuki has indeed successfully distinguished mysticism from Zen. But the case is
considerably less certain if we focus on the more philosophical and ‘‘radical’’ forms
of Western mysticism. As already mentioned, my case in point will be the German
mystic Meister Eckhart, who lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. More
about Eckhart shortly.
Thus far I have used Suzuki as our initial introduction to Japanese thought, but
what does Nishida have to say? In his last work, completed just days before his death
at the very end of World War II, he wrote: ‘‘Zen has nothing to do with mysticism, as
many think.’’ 6 Like Suzuki, Nishida bases his conclusion on what he takes to be the
nearly universal Western assumption of dualism, which he tends to call ‘‘object’’
logic, that divides the world of experience into subject and object, human being
and God.7 He acknowledges that Western mysticism ‘‘is something extremely close
to Zen,’’ but nonetheless ‘‘stands at an opposite pole to the Zen experience of noth-
ingness.’’ 8 What Zen and Nishida both affirm is kensho, or the self-awareness of the
self’s true nature.9 Yet, ‘‘in the depths of the self is that which transcends the self.’’ 10
The self discovers itself to be a bottomless contradictory identity and, as such, is both
individual self and yet a manifestation of the whole of things as nothingness. In more
traditional religious language he tells us that ‘‘we are images of God as mirrors of the
self-reflection of the absolute One, and yet we are beings of absolute self-will.’’ 11
Still more succinctly: ‘‘to transcend oneself is to return to one’s true self. . . . ‘Mind
in itself is Buddha, Buddha in itself is mind.’ To think of the objective identity of
mind and Buddha would be to misconstrue the point. It would be to employ a West-
ern logic of objective identification.’’ 12

2 Philosophy East & West

 So, instead, we must use Nishida’s sense of becoming the thing itself; that is to
say, we look into our own souls with Jakob Boehme’s ‘‘reversed eye,’’ 13 and we see
God or nothingness in ourselves, for we are self-contradictorily both manifestations
of nothingness and self-willed autonomous individuals. We need to see the reality of
things stereoscopically, as individual yet one, as immanent yet transcendent. Reli-
gious experience is not something set apart from common experience, but is pre-
cisely the seeing of the everyday in a new light, just as it is. It is to see with an ordi-
nary mind that, in fact, is not what is usually thought of as ordinary; it is to become
no-minded, apprehending things and ourselves in their and our suchness.14 Nishida
is right in that he is not talking about a special kind of consciousness and that the
ordinary mind is the correct pathway, but it is neither a common way, nor is it easily
achieved. Zen Buddhists and mystics work hard to reach the heights, or depths, that
they claim to reach, and if Nishida is an adequate representative of Zen, then both
speak of love as their theory of knowledge. Nishida writes that ‘‘love is the deepest
knowledge of things. Analytical, inferential knowledge is a superficial knowledge,
and it cannot grasp reality. We can reach reality only through love. Love is the cul-
mination of knowledge.’’ 15 It would be difficult to imagine anything closer to a mys-
tical theory of knowledge than this passage. Indeed, his most outstanding student
and disciple, Nishitani Keiji, even against Nishida’s own denial of mysticism, con-
cludes that ‘‘once the standpoint of immediate experience has entered the realm of
religion, it is related to the experience of the mystics. . . . This affinity with the mysti-
cal is another of the distinguishing marks of An Inquiry Into the Good.’’ 16
My working hypothesis, then, is that Nishida does present us with an intensely
argued philosophy that is, all the same, a mystical philosophy. It is one that is quite
unlike most others in its rigor, yet remarkably similar to Eckhart’s position, once one
tones down the specifically Christian and Buddhist overtones of each. What Nishida
wants to show in his philosophy is that ‘‘mystical does not mean . . . contrary to
knowledge,’’ or at least it need not mean that, although it is often taken to be so,
even by some mystics.17

Meister Eckhart: An Example Closer to Home

I turn to Eckhart now, as the major source of insight for the positive use of the term
‘‘nothingness’’ in Western literature. Of course, he is by no means alone, for there
were other equally radical but lesser-known mystics of the Middle Ages to whom
we might turn: Marguerite Porete, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Hadewijch are
examples. But Eckhart is exemplary in his clarity and courage in voicing his insights
and understanding. Bernard McGinn provides us with a useful entrée with his sug-
gestion that it is the ‘‘ground’’ (grunt/grund) that serves as the ‘‘master metaphor’’ in
Eckhart’s work.18 It is a master metaphor because it ties together his many descrip-
tions of both the object and goal of his mystical understanding, which is perhaps best
summarized by the phrase ‘‘God’s ground and my ground [are] the same ground.’’ 19
Yet while this metaphor is the center and ultimate point of Eckhart’s experiential
wisdom, it is the case that grunt’s meaning, ‘‘paradoxically, vanishes from our grasp

Robert E. Carter 3
 when we try [to] contain it in a definable scheme, or circumference, of specula-
tion.’’ 20 This ineffability is all too familiar to scholars of Japanese thought, where
both nothingness and the self are somehow known but are never objects of knowl-
edge. The eye sees all things but cannot see itself; so while it sees everything else
imaginable, it is unknown in anything like the same way itself. It cannot become
an object of its own seeing but can only be apprehended reflectively, if at all, in
and through the act of seeing. Similarly, fire can burn all things (if hot enough), but
can never burn itself. Fire burns without burning. Still, even though, for Eckhart, God
and the self are beyond words and cannot be objectified, the term ‘‘ground’’ does
give us important needed information that might point us in the right direction.
McGinn suggests, drawing on the learning of scholars of Middle High German,
that the word grunt (ground) was typically used in one or more of four different
ways. The first general manner of usage is to signify the physical ground beneath
our feet, the earth. Second, it can also mean bottom, or the lowest side of an object
or surface. Hell was thought of as being at the bottom of the universe, as in abyss
(abgrunt). Third, it was used to signify the origin, or beginning, or cause or reason
for something. Fourth, it can be used to refer to that which is hidden, innermost, or
that which is most proper to a thing, namely its essence. Eckhart and his followers
used it often in this fourth sense to refer to the depths of the soul, the bottomlessness
within us. But just as it refers to our hidden depths, it can also be used to refer to the
hidden depths of God. McGinn argues that a still more important use and meaning is
grunt’s linkage with principium, a term that is used to indicate the ‘‘emanation’’ of
the three persons of the Trinity. It points to creation, an ‘‘inner boiling’’ within God
and a ‘‘boiling over’’ that is descriptive of the activity of creation. And here again
West and East seem to converge, for this boiling over is a pure potentiality of the di-
vine depths, just as absolute nothingness is often referred to as a fullness, an un-
bounded richness of possibility, a ‘‘pregnant’’ emptiness.
McGinn points to the already cited passage in Eckhart’s work as the key thesis
that exploded the limits and expectations of the theology of Eckhart’s day, and car-
ried him to the heart of his views on God: ‘‘God’s ground and my ground [are] the
same ground.’’ 21 McGinn takes this to be the announcement of a new and distinc-
tive form of mysticism, a mysticism that radically expands previous understanding,
and that stretches language beyond its customary limits in order to point to a yet
deeper understanding of God’s nature and His relationship to us. The innermost in
God is identical with the innermost in us. At this level, there is an ‘‘absolute unity’’ of
God and the human person. In this sense, we are already divine, already one with
God. Both God and we humans share the same origin: ‘‘the ground that has no
ground.’’ 22 Even more powerfully, Eckhart writes, ‘‘If anyone wishes to come into
God’s ground and his innermost, he must first come into his own ground and his in-
nermost, for no one can know God who does not first know himself.’’ 23
This insistence on a fused identity is surprising, if not heretical. Indeed, it has
been a consistent concern throughout the history of the mysticisms of the West: is
the separation and distinctness of Creator and created maintained, or is there an
eventual oneness of identity in the mystical merging that is depicted? The ground

4 Philosophy East & West

is the ‘‘uncreated something in the soul,’’ and, whether God or human, ‘‘this ground
is a simple silence, in itself immovable, and by this immovability all things are
moved, all life is received by those who in themselves have rational being.’’ 24 This
ground lies deeper than the Trinity, beyond even the Father and the birth of the
Word, notes McGinn, making this perhaps the most dangerous of Eckhart’s teach-
ings, as well as his most distinctive and original. He distinguishes between God
and Godhead, as is well known, noting that while the Godhead does not act, God
does. The Godhead becomes God ‘‘in the flowering of creation. God unbecomes
when the mystic is not content to return to the ‘God’ who acts, but effects a ‘breaking
through’ (durchbrechen) to the hidden source through their union in the decon-
structed ‘intellect.’’’ 25
Moreover, there is yet another potential point of comparison to note. McGinn
refers to Susanne Kobele’s claim that Eckhart’s identification of the divine ground
with the ground of the human soul is ‘‘a dynamic identity.’’ 26 McGinn adds that
this ground ‘‘should be understood not as a state or condition, but as the activity of
grounding—the event or action of being in a fused relation.’’ 27 To state this the way
another student of mysticism does, this means that God is a verb.28 God, or, for Eck-
hart, ‘‘Godhead,’’ is not a thing, not something that ‘‘exists,’’ but rather is that activity
that brought existences into being, and is that which sustains them. Rabbi David
Cooper writes, ‘‘We can relate to God as an interactive verb. It is God-ing. More-
over, from this perspective, creation should not be treated as a noun. It too is an
interactive verb; it is constantly creationing. And, dear reader, you should not treat
yourself as a noun—as Joan, or Bill, or Barbara, or John.’’ 29 And then, as if to para-
phrase the Buddhist notion of the radical interdependence and interconnection of
things, Rabbi Cooper adds: ‘‘Each part in the universe is in dynamic relationship
with every other part. . . . The true discovery of the intimacy of our ongoing relation-
ship with the Divine can dramatically change our lives. It often happens spontane-
ously, without a reason. Some call this experience ‘grace.’’’ 30 Similarly, McGinn
says of Eckhart that ‘‘this continuous union with God is not an ‘experience’ in the
ordinary sense of the term—it is coming to realize and live out of the ground of ex-
perience, or, better, of consciousness. It is a new way of knowing and acting, not any
particular experience or act of knowing something.31 And the mystic’s way of being
in the world is radically transformed by this event. Ueda stresses the point that any
sense of ‘‘union’’ in Eckhart must be thought of as a ‘‘oneness,’’ rather than a union:
‘‘What matters for Eckhart is to return to the point where ‘I and God’ are one, not
united, and to live there always renewed, always present.’’ 32 God and the soul are
simply one.
Eckhart insists that Godhead is beyond all conception. McGinn thinks of this
achievement in understanding as akin to the Death-of-God theology of more recent
times, for we are required to totally abandon self, all things, and even God.33 Nishi-
tani quotes Eckhart, who exclaims, ‘‘I beg of God that he make me rid of God,’’ and
‘‘I flee from God for the sake of God.’’ 34 It is a letting-go, akin to the dropping-off of
Zen with respect to worldly things and especially to the ego or everyday self. We
must forsake God, because ‘‘as long as the soul has God, knows God and is aware

Robert E. Carter 5
 of God, she is far from God.’’35 We must let our soul die in God, lose herself in God,
and then even the imaging of God must cease, and God is lost in order that there be
nothingness—only nothingness. Then, using the same ‘‘eye’’ example mentioned
earlier, Eckhart concludes that ‘‘the eye in which I see God is the same eye in which
God sees me. My eye and God’s eye [are] one eye and one seeing, one knowing,
and one loving.’’ 36 And one now lives out this new awareness as one knows, acts,
and loves in the world.
Nishitani concurs that Eckhart offers ‘‘the most radical example of negative the-
ology,’’ 37 and that God’s true essence can only be described as ‘‘absolute nothing-
ness.’’ Amplifying this, Nishitani writes that ‘‘absolute nothingness signals, for Eck-
hart, the point at which all modes of being are transcended, at which . . . even the
modes of divine being—such as Creator or Divine Love—are transcended. Creator,
he [Eckhart] says, is the Form of God that is bared to creatures and seen from the
standpoint of creatures, and as such is not to be taken as . . . the essence of God.’’ 38
Nishitani concludes that God’s essence ‘‘renders ineffable’’ all forms and modes of
being of God, and therefore ‘‘absolute nothingness’’ is Eckhart’s way of indicating
that the ultimate God, or, as I like to say it, the nothingness beyond God, is beyond
words and conception. Indeed, even to speak of God’s essence is to have said too
much.
In comparing Eckhart with Zen, Ueda Shizuteru reminds us that ‘‘the radicalness
of Zen is evident from the fact that it speaks of nothingness pure and simple, while
Eckhart speaks of the nothingness of the godhead. For Eckhart, to say that God is in
his essence a nothingness is to treat nothingness merely as the epitome of all nega-
tive expressions for the purity of the essence of God, after the manner of negative
theology.’’ 39 Ueda agrees that ‘‘we can see something analogous to the Zen sense
of nothingness . . . in Meister Eckhart’s idea of the nothingness of the Godhead.’’ 40
Eckhart’s nothingness is never just nothingness, but always the nothingness of the
godhead. Furthermore, while there is a clear recognition in Eckhart that the soul
and the godhead are one, nature is almost completely cast to one side, whereas in
Zen, nothingness expresses itself in and through nature as a whole.41
McGinn concludes his discussion of the ground of Eckhart by noting that the
actualized mystic, as one who lives in continuous union with God, cannot be said
to be having an ‘experience’ of God in any ordinary meaning of the term. Rather, it is
a realization, a self-transformation coupled with an ever-present sense of living from
the ground of experience in one’s everyday actions. ‘‘It is a new way of knowing and
acting, not any particular experience or act of knowing something.’’ 42

Nishida

For Nishida, God is an experience. This is true for most Japanese religious traditions,
and the way to actualize this experiential potential, which is open to us all, is
through the practice of self-cultivation, or self-realization. Nishida insists that reli-
gion is ‘‘an event of one’s soul,’’ 43 and that rational proofs have little or nothing to
do with God:

6 Philosophy East & West

 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 knowl-
edge of God.44
And, like Eckhart, he refers to this conception of God as ‘‘the ground of reality,’’
or the ‘‘base of reality.’’ 45 Following Jacob Boehme’s image, Nishida remarks that we
must come to ‘‘see’’ or experience God with a ‘‘reversed eye.’’ 46 It will come as no
surprise that the reason why he is so certain that we are all, in our depths, religious,
is because the true or ‘‘deep’’ self in each of us is identical with God. This is why the
‘‘reversed eye’’ will lead us to God, for to see the divine within ourselves is at the
same time to see God. ‘‘Within the very breast of creatures as small as we are, bound
to the limits of space and time, . . . the unifying power of infinite reality is there. Be-
cause we possess this power, we are able to seek out the truth of the universe
through study, to express the true meaning of reality in art, to know in our innermost
heart the foundations of reality that structure the universe—in short, to comprehend
the face of God,’’ 47 or, perhaps better, the nothingness beyond God.
The claim that we are God in our depths, and that we are one with God in na-
ture is rarely found in the three main Western religions, except in the mystical tradi-
tions. By contrast, this idea is ubiquitous in the East. That we are all intrinsically di-
vine and/or, by nature, good is a fundamental belief, indeed a fundamental starting
point for many Eastern philosophies and religions. And the direct route to the real-
ization that we are divine—or, more precisely, for the Buddhist, that we are not sep-
arate from the whole of things, that is, that we are interconnected with all at our
unfathomable depths—is generally some form of meditation or self-cultivational
practice through which we lose our small self in order to reach our true or deep
self. Nishitani Keiji summarizes Nishida’s position succinctly: ‘‘How does this great
self relate to God? Clearly God is conceived of as something inseparable from the
true self. God does not transcend the true self and stand outside it.’’ 48 This involves
a uniting of subject and object. Nonduality is another key notion in understanding
the Kyoto School thinkers, and Zen Buddhism. The dualism of the West, codified in
Husserl’s dictum that consciousness is always consciousness of some object (a sub-
ject aware of an object)—his doctrine of intentionality—is seen as a precise and
accurate account of everyday awareness, but not of the enlightenment experience
itself. Enlightenment breaks through the ‘‘floor’’ of everyday experience, and dis-
cerns a nonduality where the distinction between self and other disappears. Turning
to Nishitani once more, he confirms this:
In knowing our true self we merge with the good of humanity in general where self and
other are joined as one; we fuse with the noumenon of the cosmos and become one with
the substance of the universe and merge with the will of God. The way to know the
true self and join ourselves to God lies in appropriating the power to unite subject and
object as one. This state of appropriation is called being born again in Christianity and
enlightened insight in Buddhism. . . . To know the true self is to become one with God.

Robert E. Carter 7
 Enlightenment is a vision of the divine, seeing God with inverted eye. . . . In other words,
when the unifying power of the universe of reality is experienced immediately as the in-
finite activity of the human mind and appropriated as such, the power of God throughout
the universe becomes a fact of immediate experience.49

Still, Nishitani’s account does seem to be about a unification of what was at least
seen to be dual. And perhaps this is the major point to be made: from the ordinary
perspective, mysticism is the coming to oneness of experiencer and God; from the
perspective of pure experience, human and absolute are always already one, never
having been anything but one all along. Nondual experience is experience as it is
prior to the subject-object split, indeed prior to all division and distinction making.
And while Husserl, and many of us in the West, would deny that there is such non-
dual experience, it is taken as experienced fact by Nishida and his followers. There
are, of course, critics of this view.
To take a familiar example, Bernard Faure has been critical of the sometimes too
saccharine reception of the Kyoto School thinkers. Yet, in his attempts to maintain
the critical spirit, he merely quotes Steven Katz, who, in his Mysticism and Philo-
sophical Analysis, all too quickly concludes that ‘‘there are no pure (i.e. unmediated)
experiences. . . . That is, all experience is processed through, organized by, and
makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological ways.’’ 50 So much
for Nishida’s focus on ‘‘pure’’ experience. Faure admits that he is uncomfortable with
Katz’ way of going about things and goes on to remark that ‘‘Katz’s argument is
somewhat weakened by its dogmatic tone.’’ 51 In fact, Katz misses the point alto-
gether, for neither Nishida nor any mystic of any stripe claims to be dealing with or-
dinary experience. And neither Katz nor Faure can simply legislate away the claims
of extraordinary experience that have appeared, and continue to appear, in the liter-
ature worldwide, both within and completely outside religious traditions.
Similarly, could I wipe away all doubt as to the authenticity of such experiences
by simply stating that they do exist, adopting an equally dogmatic standpoint? What
remains for us all is a perpetually unresolved philosophical problem to be examined
and reexamined, as it has been for centuries. While few in Japan have any direct ac-
quaintance with enlightenment (satori in Zen Buddhism), nonetheless it is in the cul-
tural ‘‘air’’ and is generally assumed to be a genuine result of the various medita-
tional methods of self-cultivation, including the various arts: calligraphy, the martial
arts, the way of tea, flower arranging, landscape gardening, et cetera.
In any event, what Nishida wishes to point out is that the most fundamental ex-
perience is nondual experience. He reminds us that subjects and objects have to be
carved out of something that is not yet so carved. Borrowing a term from William
James, he defines ‘‘pure experience’’ as ‘‘the state of experience just as it is without
the least addition of deliberative discrimination.’’ 52 Once again returning to an ex-
amination of consciousness, he characterizes pure experience as an immediate
awareness: ‘‘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 uni-
fied.’’ 53 It is experience prior to the distinction of the various kinds of conscious

8 Philosophy East & West

abilities, namely knowing, feeling, and willing, since these are all aspects of the sub-
jective self that has not yet been differentiated. There is a layer of experience be-
neath the everyday phenomena of which Husserl speaks, a layer that is always a
self-unfolding unity. This deep self of pure experience cannot be objectified, spoken
of directly, or perceived. It is a basho, an empty place, a nothingness from which an
objective self can be abstracted, but which presents itself as an awareness without
one who is aware; a seamless awareness where knower and what is known are not
yet distinguished. The deep self of pure experience is not a construction of con-
sciousness, but a manifestation of that unity that lies at its depths. What is to be
plumbed, then, is a consciousness that

is never confined to the so-called individual, which is not more than one small system
within consciousness. We usually take a microsystem with corporeal existence as its nu-
cleus to be the center, but if we try to think of a larger system of consciousness as the
axis, this macrosystem would be the self and its development the realization of the will
of the self. It is something like this with serious devotees of religion or scholarship or art.54

We then would have deepened and widened the connections of the unifying power
of pure experience with the unifying power of the universe itself. One passes beyond
the frame of reference of the individual to a self-awareness that becomes the broad
and deep system of pure experience itself, prior to distinctions between self and all
others. It is this move beyond the individual that leads Nishida to the religious, for
what is now grasped is that ‘‘our true self is the very study of the universe. To know
the true self is not only to be joined to the good of humanity in general, but also to
melt into the stuff of the universe and to blend in with the divine will.’’ 55 Nishitani
adds that ‘‘to see things by becoming them is a standpoint that kills the ego com-
pletely by becoming the principle of the universe itself. It is a standpoint of pure ex-
perience at which he joins to the power that unifies all things. If we call it mind, it is
not the mind of a mind-matter opposition but rather a mind that transcends them
both, a mind like the mind of which it is said, ‘the mind just as it is, is the Bud-
dha.’’’ 56 It is a cosmic consciousness.

God

We are left with a conception of God that is quite different from most Western con-
ceptions. God is not a transcendent personality outside the world. It is Nishitani who
best summarizes Nishida’s take on God’s nature: ‘‘What Nishida means . . . is that
all things come about through the unity of God—‘the unifying activity of God is at
once the unifying activity of all things’—and that this fills us with a sense of an ‘infi-
nite love’ that makes us think of God as personal.’’ 57 In a way, we are God’s self-
awareness, for we are God made manifest: ‘‘our consciousness is one part of God’s
consciousness.’’ 58 Religion, for Nishida, involves a transformation of one’s life, and
this transformation consists of leaving the subjective self of ordinary human experi-
ence behind and becoming aware of that unity that exists at one’s depths, and the
unity in the cosmos as a whole, which are one and the same.

Robert E. Carter 9
 There is a tendency to fear or dismiss pantheistic interpretations of God and the
world because such a rendering is thought to remove personality from things; at oth-
er times, we cling to personality in such a way as to separate ourselves from nature,
and from the universe, keeping personality solely for ourselves and rendering nature
unresponsive, alien, and dense. However, Nishida’s meaning of ‘‘personality’’ is one
that refers to something beyond the ordinary subjective self, to the true person be-
hind or beneath, which only appears when the subjective self, the egoic self, is for-
gotten or left behind. What has been realized is that there is an infinite unifying
power at the ground of reality, and our own deep self is one with this power. This
is Nishida’s ‘‘ground,’’ and it is remarkably akin to Eckhart’s. To know reality is to
know the self. The ‘‘personality’’ of this power is encompassed in the term ‘‘God.’’
Yet, this God is to be found within, as one with our own deep self. As such, God
is a no-thing, and is beyond all objectification. This is Nishida’s God beyond God,
his nothingness beyond God. Most will be familiar with the well-known saying of
Dōgen, which crystallizes both the path to understanding and the understanding of
the relation between self and whole: ‘‘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 actualized by myriad
things.’’ 59
For Nishida, then, ‘‘the universe is not a creation of God, but a manifestation of
God,’’ 60 for ‘‘there is nothing that is not a manifestation of God.’’ 61 In that sense,
‘‘our consciousness is one part of God’s consciousness.’’ 62

Nothingness

And what of nothingness? Analogous to the way in which Eckhart and Paul Tillich
referred to ‘‘the God beyond God,’’ Nishida’s God is inevitably a nothingness be-
yond God. And the same nothingness that is the ultimate foundation of the universe
is also to be found deep within each of us. This direct experience of the nothingness
within is described by Nishida as more like a ‘‘feeling.’’ In Nishida’s words:

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 as 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 concep-
tual knowledge.63

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.’’ 64 This is most evident when the self is merged
with its activity, and all qualities disappear in one undifferentiated awareness. How-
ever, it is an awareness that is perfectly lucid and clear, for it is everything, without
being a distinguishable anything. It is not an awareness of something, nor is it some-
one being aware. There is just awareness. The most efficient way of reaching such
feeling is through the various paths of meditation. The methods of Zen sitting (zazen),
the diligent practice of the tea ceremony, the various martial arts, the writing of

10 Philosophy East & West

haiku poems—all of these self-cultivational forms are training in meditation that ul-
timately could lead one to pure experience, with its focus on the moment, on the
here and now, where all activity is going on in the midst of pure awareness. This
was also the Buddha’s experience. The Buddha is your own mind, as your mind
gives way to the place that is now the focus.
The focus, if indeed there can be said to be a focus at all, is on the background
rather than on the foreground of experience. Your true self, as pure experience, is
an undifferentiated place (Nishida’s basho) or opening where all things arise. It is a
place or ‘‘clearing’’ (Heidegger) that is itself without characteristics, and so is
‘‘where’’ all things arise, or take form. To try to characterize it as anything more
than an aperture or dynamic place is to lose it. Even this is to say too much. It is
empty. And because it has no characteristics of its own, it is able to allow experi-
ences of an indefinite number of forms and qualities to arise, to be revealed. It is the
formless ‘‘place’’ where any form may arise. Because it has no form of its own, it is
able to give birth or place to all possible forms. Indeed, the only route to an under-
standing of this formlessness is by the direct experience of its revealing of the myriad
forms. The awareness of forms reveals, beneath these forms, the formless, which
makes the awareness of forms possible, in the same way that the seeing of things
presupposes an unseen seer, namely the eye. The eye can never see itself directly,
although it is capable of seeing all other things directly; in the same way, the self can
never catch the self directly, not as pure subjectivity. To objectify the self is to grant
that there is an awareness that has just objectified the self, but which itself is never
an object—it is just awareness and can never be caught in this objective fashion, but
ever resides at the back of consciousness as pure awareness itself.
All unity of consciousness, whether God’s or that of an individual, ‘‘cannot be-
come the object of knowledge, and transcends all categories; we are unable to give
it any fixed form, and all things are established according to it.’’ 65 In Ueda’s terms,
nothingness ‘‘dissolves substance thinking,’’ and even nothingness itself must not be
viewed as a kind of substance, ‘‘or even as the nihilum of a kind of ‘minus sub-
stance.’’’ 66 What results is a nothingness of nothingness, a negation of negation.
Ueda’s gloss on this statement is both useful and insightful, for he maintains that
this negation of negation entails a movement in two directions at the same time:
‘‘(1) the negation of negation in the sense of a further denial of negation that does
not come back around to affirmation but opens up into an endlessly open nothing-
ness; and (2) the negation of negation in the sense of a return to affirmation without
any trace of mediation.’’ 67 It is a death and a resurrection, a taking away of the world
and a giving back of the world with a brilliance and distinctness hitherto unknown.
The path to an understanding of nothingness, then, involves the self as pure
awareness. Focusing in on the question of the relationship between God and noth-
ingness, Masao Abe writes that ‘‘if Ultimate Reality, which being taken as Nothing-
ness or Emptiness, should be called ‘Him’ or ‘Thou,’ it is, from the Zen point of view,
no longer ultimate.’’ 68 Speaking from within the Zen tradition, Abe states unambigu-
ously that ‘‘True Emptiness is never an object found outside of oneself. It is what is
really unobjectifiable. Precisely for this reason it is the ground of true objectivity.’’ 69

Robert E. Carter 11
 Some Buddhists, even Zen Buddhists, will speak of Buddha or even of God in seem-
ingly Christian-like terms. Nevertheless, the self-corrective background of Buddhism
forces one to understand that such words are used analogically. A creed, an image, a
sacred work, even the actual Buddha himself are but pointers, ‘‘hundred-foot poles’’
to be used as finite springboards carrying one to the top of a seemingly unscalable
cliff, that is, into the depths of nothingness itself. Once one has scaled the heights,
the pole can be left behind. But, as with Eckhart, the masses need to focus on the
pole, for most will not be in shape to vault themselves above the cliff’s rim. For the
spiritual athlete, however, the pole is left behind once the goal has been reached;
the pole, God, and the creeds are no longer the point. Thus, as D. T. Suzuki writes,
‘‘what we must grasp is that in which God and man have not yet assumed their
places.’’ 70 This undivided something out of which even God arises is the nothing-
ness beyond God, which is the ground of God, the Godhead, both being and non-
being. It is the ultimate ground of everything.
Etymologically, ‘‘nothingness’’ or ‘‘emptiness’’ is a Buddhist notion, originally
termed śūnyatā in Sanskrit. ‘‘Śūnyatā’’ is difficult to translate, but it derives from the
Sanskrit root ‘‘su,’’ which means, among other things, ‘‘to be swollen,’’ both like a
hollow balloon, hence empty, and like a pregnant woman, hence full. Thus, while
śūnyatā may be nothing, and empty, it is also pregnant with possibilities. All the
while it must be kept firmly in mind that the notion of śūnyatā is deconstructive in
its force. It is a heuristic notion, and not a cognitive or metaphysical one with an in-
dependent and substantial existence. There is no such thing as śūnyatā—emptiness,
nothingness. Śūnyatā is permanently ‘‘under erasure.’’ The notion itself is employed
to help us let go of our concepts, in which case we must let go of the concept of
śūnyatā as well. It was Nāgārjuna who warned that śūnyatā was a snake that, if
grasped at the wrong end, could prove fatal; and yet that is what has happened
repeatedly in later Buddhism. Śūnyatā became a ‘‘thing,’’ became reified, and avail-
able to ‘‘representational’’ thinking.

Creation

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. Further-
more, no special revelation or moment is privileged, for ‘‘every single moment of in-
finite time has the solemn gravity that these privileged moments possess in Christian-
ity.’’ 71 In other words, 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
Japanese kimono: it is the unseen and rarely glimpsed that gives shape and ultimate
meaning to the whole. The connoisseur alone realizes the importance of the lining,
while also recognizing that the value of the lining is best revealed by paying atten-
tion to the shape and color of the outer form of the kimono. ‘‘Ultimate Reality is not
something far away, over there, it is right here, right now. Everything starts from the
here-and-now. Otherwise, everything loses its reality.’’ 72 You, me, rocks, and the
seeming emptiness of outer space itself are all forms of the formless, and, as such,

12 Philosophy East & West

are particular revelations of that which is prior to both the finite and the infinite, the
secular and the divine. Any attempt to define it in words will fail, but one can catch
it in the marrow of direct experience, in pure experience. It is the place, itself with-
out characteristics, out 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 or
anything else was differentiated.
Of course, one could find salvation both within or beyond this world through the
many approaches that religion and spirituality afford. The point at issue here, how-
ever, is that it is all too easy to dismiss the more abstract and unexpected ultimate
principle of Nishida and Zen Buddhism as mere vacuous assertion, a legacy of
unethical times past, than it is to dismiss the Western theorizings about God, being,
and being’s ground. I suspect that Nishida may be closer to the truth and to the point
of this chapter when he writes:

Reality is both being and non-being; it is being-qua-non-being, and non-being-qua-being.

It is both subjective and objective, both noesis and noema. Subjectivity and objectivity
are absolutely opposed, but reality is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, i.e., the
self-identity of this absolute opposition.73

The notion of our self as an identity of self-contradiction becomes an increas-

ingly focal theme in Nishida’s work. Not only are we self-contradictory at our core,
but so is reality itself as experienced. Religious experience arises when one becomes
aware of ‘‘a profound existential contradiction in the depth of his own self.’’ 74 As in
the series of the Ten Ox-herding pictures, this awareness, at first, is but the whispers
and quiet murmurings of the deeper self (the Ox). The foreground of this growing ex-
istential awareness is the fact of our own mortality. We live by dying. Furthermore,
the existential death of which the religious individual is aware arises from our look-
ing directly at the nothingness at the roots of our bottomless self. We not only die a
biological death, but we die an eternal death at each moment. Hence, at the depths
of our awareness of self is the recognition that we are a no-self. This point could be
elaborated by retracing the path of the Buddha himself and his denial of the substan-
tive nature of the self in his doctrine of anatman. We face our own inner depths, and
we find our individuality slipping away into ‘‘absolute infinity, the absolute other.’’ 75
This is absolute negation, for we are a momentary, impermanent reflection of the
whole. Essentially, we are absolute nothingness; it is only temporarily that we are a
form, an expression of this infinity. We are a self-determination of the absolute, a
self-manifestation of the absolute, hence our divinity. It is thus that ‘‘the self truly
realizes its own temporal uniqueness as it faces its own eternal negation.’’ 76 Our
uniqueness lies in the fact that we are this particular self-manifestation of the abso-
lute, and there is no other exactly like us, with the same history, the same fears and
aspirations, the same longings and satisfactions. But my very existence is an absolute
contradiction, between individuality and a reflection of the whole, and it is this real-
ization that enables me to become truly self-conscious. My individuality is my mor-
tality, and my true nothingness is my immortality. I am a contradictory self, and my
awareness of this is the ground of my religious awareness.

Robert E. Carter 13
 The absolute contradiction is ever present, in layer after layer, and Nishida turns
what appears to be mere anguish into anguish and the realization of meaning and
joy—another contradictory pair: ‘‘For to realize one’s own death is simultaneously
to realize the fundamental meaning of one’s own existence.’’ 77 It is by dying, by
leaving the self behind, and confronting the nothingness that is at the core of our be-
ing, that we actually come to encounter the divine at all. Our loss is our gain; our
death is the giver of eternal life. The dying is not washed away, however, for the
antinomy of paradox remains. Immortality arises only at the price of mortality. The
divine is immanent, for it is our own bottomless self. At the same time, this divinity
is, ‘‘in itself,’’ absolute nothingness. Hence, ‘‘God is ‘nowhere and yet everywhere in
the world.’’’ 78

On Being Human

Perhaps all of this can be made clearer still by returning to our previous discussions
of the self. The self is both personal and unique and a manifestation of infinite One-
ness. When we see in another that he or she is divine, we are looking deep within
that person, at the divine ‘‘spark’’ that resides in his or her depths. But when we
talk with this person, interact with this person, and perhaps intimately love this per-
son, we are primarily dealing with the surface self or ego. The self, recall, is a self-
contradictory identity, for it is both one of many and a manifestation of the One. It is
both One and not-One. Only by reframing language in this way can we even begin
to give expression to the complexity and paradoxicality that is the human being. We
are both divine and human, individual and nonindividual, mortal and immortal, et
cetera. As a result, I can now grasp that you are my brother or my sister in having
the same divine origin, in being of the same divine ‘‘stuff’’ as me. But I still interact
with you as a separate individual, as Frederick or as Jillian. You are both an aspect of
the One, of absolute nothingness, as am I. And so is God, as we conceive him/her.
The God of religions is not to be rejected, but neither is He/She to be taken as ulti-
mate, for there is a God beyond all conceptions of God, a more ultimate divinity.
This ground, as Eckhart told us, is ‘‘pure possibility.’’ 79 Whether as Jesus Christ or
as Buddha, the divine in us was revealed by those enlightened souls who knew
who they were. And, as Eckhart stated so forcibly, ‘‘God became man so that man
might become God.’’ 80

Zen as ‘‘Non-Mysticism’’

Perhaps the leading interpreter of Nishida’s philosophy is Ueda Shizuteru, profes-

sor emeritus at Kyoto University. Ueda’s Ph.D. thesis was a study of Eckhart and
Zen, a theme that he has continued to explore throughout his career. In a recent
essay, Ueda repeats a position that he has maintained all along—that allows those
who have argued that Nishida in particular, and Zen generally, are mystical in
orientation—to be, at least, partially right. And those, like Nishida himself, who
have argued the opposite, are also partially correct.

14 Philosophy East & West

 Ueda contends that Zen includes the mystical, but that it goes beyond it by be-
coming ‘‘non-mysticism.’’ 81 Non-mysticism, while not just mysticism, nevertheless
includes mysticism in a relationship that Ueda insists is dynamic; the mystical foun-
dation of non-mysticism continues to inform and affect non-mysticism, and non-
mysticism continues to affect mysticism. The insight offered is that of a mutual inter-
action where each relational aspect continues to inform and affect the other ad
infinitum.
Non-mysticism, Ueda makes very clear, is not not-mysticism. Simply put, non-
mysticism denies mysticism, deeming it nonexistent or even absurd.82 This position
maintains that there is no such thing as a mystical experience of the oneness of all
things; so-called mystics are simply deluded.
On the other hand, as I read Ueda, what characterizes non-mysticism is twofold.
First, something spiritual arises in the experience of the mutually interactive rela-
tionship between mysticism and non-mysticism. It is a different spirituality from the
spirituality of mysticism. Second, the non-mystics’s experience of the oneness of all
things takes us beyond the ‘‘things,’’ beyond God, and even beyond Being, to non-
being, nothingness, mu. It is as though a hole opens, and this empty hole or opening
leads infinitely beyond. It is an opening to infinity, to the infinite universe beyond
God, then to nonbeing beyond Being, and then beyond both Being and nonbeing
to absolute nothingness. And this last is, of course, not a thing in any sense, but
more like an infinitely expanding and extending process or pathway.
Even Eckhart’s godhead is still in Being, and his march toward nothingness as its
prime characteristic remains a thing-like vision that, while going beyond Being, still
includes Being as non-Being. After all, nothingness is a characteristic of the godhead;
it is not just nothingness itself. Zen and Nishida go beyond non-Being to absolute
nothingness. Non-mysticism is the disembodiment of mysticism. Nothingness is not
a thing at all, it is but a hole, a process, an infinite event that leads us to an experi-
ence of impermanence as the only reality and of infinite flow as the only stability. It
is just nothing. As Varela writes, ‘‘It is no ground whatsoever; it cannot be grasped as
ground, reference point, or nest for a sense of ego. It does not exist—nor does it not
exist. It cannot be an object of mind or of the conceptualizing process; it cannot be
seen, heard, or thought of. . . . When the conceptual mind tries to grasp it, it finds
nothing, and so it experiences it as emptiness. It can be known (and can only be
known) directly.’’ 83
And yet Zen is ever paradoxical. Hence, once one experiences the oneness of
all things as pure nothingness—that is, all distinctions disappear, and there is only
the one of nothingness without the many—the world reappears once more with a
renewed brilliance and pinpoint sharpness, and each thing now self-manifests with
an even more intense distinctness. Those familiar with the Ten Oxherding Pictures
will recognize this as the move from picture eight, of the empty circle as mu, to pic-
ture nine, filled with bright blossoms, rushing water, rocks, and grass, and all with a
new, intense brilliance. The enlightened individual sees both of these at once, hav-
ing acquired a kind of stereoscopic vision or having become accustomed to a dou-
ble exposure in seeing. Nishida uses another metaphor to describe this: the kimono

Robert E. Carter 15
 hangs as beautifully as it does on the wearer because of an unseen lining deftly sewn
in by a skilled seamstress or tailor. A well-tailored garment is recognizable because
of the way it hangs and keeps its shape. Likewise, all things that exist are formed as
they are, and yet their very form is a form of nothingness for those who can see, for a
nothingness that can be discerned in each and every form. In Zen, the mountains are
first lost in nothingness and then regained, but now even more brilliantly, as the form
of nothingness itself, and so it is with each and every thing. In no other way is noth-
ingness to be known except as each and every thing, for now one can ‘‘see’’ and
‘‘feel’’ the oneness of all things as absolutely nothing, and absolute nothingness as
each and every thing. One sees nothingness as every thing’s background or lining.

Conclusion

In garnering insight from Eckhart, Nishida, and Ueda, a vision of life lived in this way
seems to emerge. For Nishida, we are always already born as a self-manifestation of
the absolute, but our task as individual humans is to recollect this fact, to rediscover
that truth within ourselves, and then to live our lives in the recognition of what it is
that we really are. To do so is to pave the way for an even greater oneness than we
had originally, for to yearn for oneness as a discrete and separate seat of conscious-
ness is the goal and the weave of enlightenment itself. To know that one is divine,
while knowing this as a distinctively individual entity, yields a passion to throw one-
self into the flux of experience, gathering ever-new awareness and a deeper love of
this incredibly wonderful flow of creation. To love—oneself, another, one’s world,
and the universe of which one is a part—is to preserve and cherish all that exists. It
is to preserve the unique worth of everything that exists in the best way that one can,
even though it is impossible not to stand in the way of some of that flow in the very
course of living. When we alter the flow of another existing thing, or, sadly, even
end its flow altogether, we would still be mindful of the worth of that which is being
affected, and we should feel a deep sorrow that it had to be so, from our perspective
on life. We would have become sensitive instruments, brought to tears of joy by the
dew on a rosebud, or to tears of sadness by the roadkill on our highways and
byways.
Ultimately, this vision of things will undoubtedly change our view of the world
and our place in it, as well as our relationship with one another. In this sense, reli-
gion, for Nishida, is the ultimate source of self-transformation, a view that makes of
religiosity the stuff of everydayness: when sweeping the floor, just mindfully sweep
the floor. Whether washing dishes, going to the bathroom, teaching in the class-
room, or making love, each and every action, when performed with the mindfulness
of no-mindedness in the here and now, is an instance of God (or nothingness) made
manifest in the space and time of this very world. Our responsibility is greatly in-
creased as a result, but so is our joy and sense of purpose in a universe of which
we are now an integral part. We now see ourselves as co-creators with the universal
energy. We are ‘‘aspects’’ of nothingness, gatherers of divine experience, manifesta-
tions of the ultimate whole. Just as ‘‘God’’ is an expression of the creative function of

16 Philosophy East & West

the universe on a macrocosmic scale, so we are microcosmic expressions of that
same creative energy. God and nothingness are two sides of the same coin, but the
same can also be said of us, and of the rest of this constantly changing universe of
which we are a part. It is all one, and in spite of the horror that we ourselves all too
often create, it is still glorious, and thoroughly divine, and yet, at the same time, just
as unholy and ordinary. The mundane is divine and the divine is to be found in the
everyday, right underfoot.

Notes

1 – Nishida Kitarō, ‘‘The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West
Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective,’’ the final essay in his Fundamental
Problems of Philosophy: The World of Action and the Dialectical World, trans.
David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970), p. 237.
2 – Nishitani Keiji, ‘‘Ontology and Utterance,’’ Philosophy East and West 31 (1)
(January 1981): 40.
3 – Walter T. Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: New American Li-
brary, 1960), pp. 14–15.
4 – Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki, ‘‘An Interpretation of Zen Experience,’’ in The Japanese
Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture, ed. Charles A. Moore
(Honolulu: An East-West Center Book, the University of Hawai‘i Press, 1967),
p. 135.
5 – Ibid., p. 133.
6 – Nishida Kitarō, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans.
David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), p. 108.
7 – Ibid., p. 109.
8 – Ibid.
9 – Ibid., p. 85. Nishida writes that truly scientific knowledge about spirituality
‘‘cannot be grounded in the standpoint of the merely abstract conscious
self. . . . [I]t rather derives from the standpoint of the embodied self’s own self-
awareness. And therefore, as a fundamental fact of human life, the religious
form of life is not the exclusive possession of special individuals. The religious
mind is present in everyone. One who does not notice this cannot be a philos-
opher.’’
10 – Ibid.
11 – Ibid., p. 87.
12 – Ibid., p. 89.
13 – Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 81.

Robert E. Carter 17
 14 – Nishida, Last Writings, p. 115.
15 – Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, p. 175.
16 – Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarō, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 148. The sentences before
the quoted passage are also interesting: ‘‘Particularly striking here is the fre-
quency with which the names of mystics like Augustine, Eckhart, and Boehme
(not to mention Dionysius and Cusanus) come up in the chapters of part 4.
What is more, they are generally introduced in the context of the approfon-
dissement of the basic position of pure experience to religious experience.’’
17 – Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, p. 157.
18 – Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from
Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad, 2001), pp. 37–38.
19 – Ibid., p. 38. McGinn adds that this phrase is used frequently by Eckhart.
20 – Ibid. McGinn supplies the following citation for this passage: ‘‘See Blumenbert,
‘Paradismen,’ 131–136; idem, ‘Beobachtungen,’ 170–171.’’
21 – See note 4 above.
22 – Quoted in McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, p. 44, from Eck-
hart’s Predigt 42.
23 – McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, p. 45; from Eckhart’s Predigt
54b (Die Deutsche Werke 2 : 565.13–566.2).
24 – Ibid., p. 46; from Eckhart’s Predigt 48 (Die Deutsche Werke 2 : 420.7–421.3).
25 – Ibid., p. 46.
26 – Ibid., p. 48. The reference is to Susanne Kobele, Bilder der unbegriffenen Wahr-
heit: Zur Struktur mystischer Rede im Spannungsfeld von Latein und Volks-
sprache (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1993).
27 – Ibid.
28 – Rabbi David A. Cooper, God is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical
Judaism (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).
29 – Ibid., p. 70.
30 – Ibid.
31 – McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, p. 149.
32 – Shizuteru Ueda, ‘‘Freedom and Language in Meister Eckhart and Zen Bud-
dhism,’’ pt. 1, in Eastern Buddhist 28 (2) (Autumn 1990): 24.
33 – Ibid., p. 145.
34 – Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, p. 64.
35 – Ibid.

18 Philosophy East & West

36 – Ibid., p. 149. Reference is to Eckhart, Predigt 12 (Die Deutsche Werke [Middle
High German Works] 1 : 201.5–8).
37 – Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1982), p. 61.
38 – Ibid.
39 – Shizuteru Ueda, ‘‘‘Nothingness’ in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism,’’ in The
Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School, ed. Frederick Franck (New
York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 159.
40 – Shizuteru Ueda, ‘‘Freedom and Language in Meister Eckhart and Zen Bud-
dhism,’’ pt. 2, in Eastern Buddhist 24 (1) (Spring 1991): 55.
41 – Ibid., pp. 70–74.
42 – Ibid., p. 149. McGinn goes on to say that this new way of knowing and
acting is ‘‘Indeed, as we have seen, . . . actually achieved by not-knowing
(unwizzen).’’
43 – Nishida Kitarō, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans.
David Dilworth (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), p. 47.
44 – Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, p. 81.
45 – Ibid., pp. 79–80.
46 – Ibid., p. 81.
47 – This passage is Nishitani Keiji’s translation of Nishida in his study of Nishida,
Nishida Kitarō, trans. Yamamoto and Heisig, p. 146. In Nishida’s An Inquiry
into the Good, the Abe and Ives translation, it is found on p. 81.
48 – Nishitani, Nishida Kitarō, p. 146.
49 – Ibid., pp. 146–147.
50 – Bernard Faure, ‘‘The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism,’’ in Charles Wei-
hsun Fu and Steven Heine, eds., Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspec-
tives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 245–281, at
p. 249.
51 – Ibid., from Steven T. Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 26.
52 – Nishida, Inquiry into the Good, p. 3.
53 – Ibid., pp. 3–4.
54 – This passage is Nishitani Keiji’s translation of Nishida in his study of Nishida,
Nishida Kitarō, trans. Yamamoto and Heisig, p. 146. In Nishida’s An Inquiry
into the Good, the Abe and Ives translation, it is found on p. 81.
55 – Nishitani, Nishida Kitarō, pp. 90–91; Nishida, Inquiry into the Good, p. 145.

Robert E. Carter 19
 56 – Nishitani, Nishida Kitarō, p. 91. Nishitani adds that ‘‘the mind that changes its
perspective as it changes its location is the great free and unobstructed mind
able to see things by becoming them’’ (p. 92). In another place, Nishida goes
on to say that this ability and desire to ‘‘become things’’ is a ‘‘characteristic fea-
ture of Japanese culture,’’ which seemed to him ‘‘to lie in the direction from
subject to object [environment], ever thoroughly negating the self and becom-
ing the thing itself; becoming the thing itself to see; becoming the thing itself
to act. To empty the self and see things, for the self to be immersed in things,
‘nomindedness’ [in Zen Buddhism] or effortless acceptance of the grace of
Amida . . . these I believe, are the states we Japanese strongly yearn for. . . .
The essence of the Japanese spirit must be to become one in things and in
events. It is to become one at that primal point in which there is neither self
nor others’’ (from ‘‘The Problem of Japanese Culture,’’ in Ryusaku Tsunoda,
Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition,
vol. 2 [New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1958], p. 362).
57 – Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, p. 156.
58 – Nishida, Inquiry into the Good, p. 161.
59 – Kazuaki Tanahashi, Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), p. 70.
60 – Nishida, Inquiry into the Good, p. 158.
61 – Ibid.
62 – Ibid., p. 161.
63 – Nishida Kitarō, ‘‘Affective Feeling,’’ ed. Nitta and Tatematsu, Analecta Husserli-
ana 7 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978): 223.
64 – Ibid., p. 225.
65 – Nishida Kitarō, A Study of Good, trans. V. H. Viglielmo (Tokyo: Japanese Gov-
ernment Printing Bureau, 1960), p. 175; quotation to be found on p. 1665 of
the Abe and Ives translation of Inquiry into the Good.
66 – Ueda, The Buddha Eye, p. 161.
67 – Ibid.
68 – Masao Abe, ‘‘God, Emptiness and the True Self,’’ Eastern Buddhist 3 (2) (Octo-
ber 1969): 23.
69 – Ibid.
70 – D. T. Suzuki and Ueda Shizuteru, ‘‘The Sayings of Rinzai,’’ Eastern Buddhist 6
(1) (May 1973): 93.
71 – Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1982), p. 272.
72 – Abe, ‘‘God, Emptiness and the True Self,’’ p. 24.

20 Philosophy East & West

 73 – Nishida Kitarō, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, trans. David A. Dilworth
(Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1970), p. 246.
74 – Nishida Kitarō, ‘‘The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview,’’ in Nishida
Kitarō zenshū, vol. 11, pp. 371–464, written in 1945; quoted from Last Writ-
ings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans. David A. Dilworth (Ho-
nolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), p. 32.
75 – Nishida, Last Writings, p. 34.
76 – Ibid.
77 – Ibid.
78 – Ibid., p. 38.
79 – McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, p. 49. McGinn actually bor-
rows the phrase ‘‘pure possibility’’ from Niklaus Largier (‘‘Negativität, Möglich-
keit, Freiheit, Zur Differenz zwischen der Philosophie Dietrichs von Freiberg
und Eckharts von Hochheim,’’ in Dietrich von Freiberg: Neue Perspektiven
seiner Philosophie, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, ed. Karl-Hermann Kan-
dler, Burkhard Mojsisch, and Franz-Bernard Stamkotter [Amsterdam and Phila-
delphia: B. R. Gruner, 1998], pp. 158–162). McGinn writes of the ‘‘groundless
ground’’ or ‘‘groundless Godhead,’’ which, while beyond all movement and
distinction, remains ‘‘pure possibility.’’ One must learn to act from this place
oneself, and then there is no remaining distinction between knowing and act-
ing. The result is a spontaneous and apparently nondual spontaneity, at least
akin to the seamless action of the Zen person.
80 – McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart, p. 51. While this is not the
place to explore Eckhart’s Christology, it is worth expanding on this somewhat.
Eckhart writes: ‘‘It would be of little value for me that ‘the Word was made
flesh’ for man in Christ as a person (supposito) distinct from me, unless he was
also made flesh for me personally so that I too might be God’s son’’ (In Exposi-
tio sancti Evangelii secundum Johannem [Die Lateinische Werke 3 : 101.14–
102.2]). McGinn then inquires, ‘‘Does this mean that we ourselves become
the Second Person of the Trinity? Yes and no, according to Eckhart. Yes, in
the sense that there is only one Sonship, which is none other than the Person
of the Word; no, in the sense that ‘we are born God’s sons through adoption’’
(pp. 117–118).
81 – Shizuteru Ueda, ‘‘Meister Eckhart and Zen,’’ Journal of the Japan Society for
Buddhist-Christian Studies 4 (2005): 21–28.
82 – Ibid., p. 28.
83 – Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 68.

Robert E. Carter 21

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