Religion and Nothingness, by Keiji Nishitani. Translated with an Introduction by Jan Van Bragt. University of California Press, 1983.

Decades ago, I was a member of the US Army Reserves, serving as a combat engineer. The engineer motto is Essayons: “Let us try.” We used to joke about this, laughing that while we might not successfully accomplish very much, we sure do try! Essayons is also the source of the English word “essay”: a short piece of writing that attempts to clarify a particular topic. That’s what I’m going to do in this blog post. I am going to make an attempt at writing a short, clear explanation of a very long, difficult, and enigmatic book that I have been struggling to understand for the past few months: Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness. I may not be completely successful, but in good Engineer spirit, I certainly will try!

Jan Van Bragt, the translator of Religion and Nothingness, writes that despite his best efforts to render Nishitani’s book from Japanese into English, “I cannot flatter myself that the results make for easy reading.” (p. x) The difficultly, he tells us, is the consequence of two major issues. First, Japanese authors tend to write in an indirect manner, “circumnavigating an issue” rather than directly and succinctly stating conclusions. Nishitani in particular engages in what Bragt calls “spiral repetitiveness,” (p. xli) orbiting around a point again and again, repeating it like a musical theme. To an English language reader, this can be tedious and distracting. Secondly, Nishitani uses the notoriously difficult jargon of Heideggerian philosophy combined with the mysterious terminology of Zen Buddhism, making his book often seems cryptic and sometimes baffling. To this, I would also add that the topic of Nishitani’s investigation by its very nature is abstract and hard to grasp, so no matter what method or language one used to approach it, difficulty should be expected.

The book is a collection of six thematically related essays, woven together in order to explore how “nothingness” is conceived in both the Eastern and the Western traditions of philosophy. The book’s main thesis, as I understand it, is that Eastern “nothingness” differs from Western “nothingness” in that Eastern thought conceives of nothingness as a productive kind of “emptiness” (sunyata) while Western thought conceives of nothingness in terms of a pure negativity (nihility) that leads to meaninglessness and nihilism. Nishitani contends that while both forms of nothingness are possible “fields” against which reality can unfold, nihility is ultimately grounded in the fundamental emptiness of sunyata, which collapses all apparent, worldly dualities into unity and oneness. If we can grasp sunyata, we can grasp the unitary, productive and positive ground of all Being. Sunyata is “the real form of reality” (p. 76).

Nishitani’s jumping off point is the question, “What is religion?” Religion, he tells us, originates from our search for purpose and meaning in life (p. 4). We find ourselves in a world, doing things, and we are prompted to wonder: Why do we do the things we do? What is the reason behind it all? This concern with meaning and purpose encourages us to look outside of ourselves, to the world around us, for answers to our deepest questions. In so doing, we set our inner experience up against the outer world and thus come to think of reality in terms of a subject/object, or inner/outer, relationship. The fragmentation of reality begins with this distinction and continues as we come to conceive of reality as a place populated by disconnected “things.” The Cartesian/scientific worldview is the culmination of this perspective, which reduces the world outside of the mind to bodies in motion. Nishitani associates this perspective with the Western, negative form of nothingness called “nihilty.” When regarded in terms of nihility, reality comes to be understood as a meaningless collection of objects. This is nihilism.

Both Western theists and atheists alike encounter nihility as a threat and thus must grapple with the specter of nihilism precisely because they both view reality through a subject/object lens. In the case of Western theists, God is the ultimate subject who has created the universe as an object separate from Himself. Humans, in turn, are separated from God and are compelled to relate their own subjective consciousnesses toward God as an object. For atheist existentialists like Sartre, the human self is in constant conflict with other people and the non-human world. We are condemned to struggle against reality and objectify it as something outside of ourselves. Thus, both Western theism and atheism fragment reality by emphasizing the separation and conflict between the self and the other; between the inner world of subjective consciousness and the outer world of objects. Take away all of the subjects and all of the objects in the universe and what remains is a terrifying, desolate nothingness: a “relative nothingness,” or nihility.

The experience of nihility emerges from questioning the foundations of reality and it culminates in the view that nothing is permanent and that there is no stable ground beneath either subjects or objects. However, a further kind of questioning, a “Great Doubt” (p. 18) is capable of destabilizing our belief in the distinction between subject and object (or inner and outer) . This Great Doubt is the threshold of religion. Religion is what encourages us to adopt a standpoint that is not the “self,” but which is the very condition that allows for the generation and possibility of self-consciousness in the first place. “So long as the field of separation between within and without is not broken through, and so long as a conversion from that standpoint does not take place, the lack of unity and contradiction spoken of earlier cannot help but prevail among the things we take as real” (p. 10). Great Doubt is what allows us to break through the fragmentation entailed by subject/object thinking and to repair the unity of reality. In this, “there is neither within nor without” (p. 41). It is here that the boundaries between the personal and the impersonal are dissolved, and all things are understood to be one. This primal oneness is a kind of nothingness; but it is not the nothingness of nihility. It is the positive, “absolute nothingness” of sunyata.

Nishitani sets up a contrast between the viewpoints of science and religion. Whereas religion rests on the belief that all things in the universe are interconnected and meaningful, science promotes a view that the world is “indifferent to the fact of man” (p. 49). Humans are material objects, just like all other material objects, ruled by the impersonal laws of nature. “Human interests make no difference” (p. 50). From the perspective of religion (in particular Western religion), on the other hand, the natural world has a purpose and a plan. It has been created by God for some overarching reason. It is teleological. During the Enlightenment, the conviction developed that with the use of logic and reason, humans could understand and control the mechanisms governing impersonal, passive matter, thus empowering us to seize the basic elements of reality and direct them toward our own desired purposes. This, according to Nishitani, developed into the idea of progress. While the universe itself was viewed as passive and impersonal, human intellect could harness its potential and direct it toward the fulfillment of human desires. For Nishitani, this is connected with the development of modern atheism and the Death of God. Modern humans feel themselves liberated from the control of God, but at the same time they feel themselves exposed to the nihility of existence in a world that lacks overarching meaning or purpose (p 57). Existentialism is a powerful philosophical expression of this awareness, but modern Christianity also must grapple with it.

In Christianity, God is conceived as a person, and a person is one who possesses free-will. To be free means to be able to act in a manner that is undetermined by forces outside of one’s self. But acting in a manner that is undetermined implies that one stands outside of the laws of nature. God, according to Christianity, created humans to be free, and so both God and humans must stand, in some sense, outside of nature. This “outside” is what Nishitani seems to intend as the nothingness grounding both God and humans in their freedom. But in Christianity, this nothingness is a non-productive nothing – a nihility – since absent a person (either God or a human), it could never produce anything at all. According to Christianity, it is God that willfully conjured Being out of nothingness. God is the productive element here, not nothingness. But then this places God in the same position as modern humans who must grapple with nihilism: God is a person, both free and exposed to the meaningless nihility that underlies Being. This is the point at which the idea of God as a person undermines itself, and “God is not God himself” (p. 67). Nishitani uses this as an opportunity to suggest that perhaps we should find a way of thinking about both God and humans as something other than mere “persons.”

Personhood is related to the experience of being alive. Nishitani reminds us that the word “person” comes from the concept of a persona, which is a mask through which one speaks and acts. A persona is an appearance (p. 70), a phenomenon. Behind the appearance, however, there is nothing. The persona just is the process of life that emerges out of an interaction between appearance and non-appearance. “It is not some ‘thing’ or entity different from person. It brings into being the thing called person and becomes one with it” (p. 70). Personhood, then, is made possible by the free-flowing “nothing at all” (p. 71) that always is active in the production of the personal point of view. Nishitani’s discussion becomes quite enigmatic at this point, referring to the “seeing of not-seeing” (p. 71) and to comprehending “the near side” (p. 70), but what I generally take him to be circling around here is the idea that a genuine experience of personhood cannot conclusively be summed up and exhausted. We are animated by a process of life that is not a thing at all. It is an active no-thing-ness, and it is a mistake to reify personhood into a static collection of qualities. Nishitani counsels us to abandon the “person-centered” perspective that objectifies our subjectivity, and to shift our attention toward the “revelation” of dynamic, productive, absolute nothingness, which is a “living nothingness” (p. 71). This is the nothingness of sunyata that stands behind persons the way life stands behind a mask.

Life as we experience it is more than just physics. Nishitani suggests that there are two, linked elements that govern our world. First, there are laws of nature. Second, there is an element of animate life that is capable of harnessing the laws of nature for its own purposes (p. 82). The laws of nature explain how it is that matter interacts with matter, but this does not explain how it is that human life comes to understand, intervene in, and utilize those laws for its own projects. For instance, Nishitani points out that machines are fully governed by natural laws, yet nowhere in nature do machines appear “naturally.” Machines are constructed by humans in order to liberate them from the need to perform certain types of work. In this way, while machines are, on the one hand, expressions of natural laws, on the other hand, they are also “the supreme emancipation from the rule of the laws of nature” (p. 84). Adherence to nature’s law here results in the freedom from nature’s law. Of course, this relationship is often “perverted” and human life can become “mechanized” when we allow the laws of nature, through the machine, to reassert control over human life (p. 85). But there is also danger in thinking that humans can be completely liberated from the laws of nature altogether. Humans are part of nature and should not be thought of as separate from nature. We are unique in being able to understand our nature and to use that nature in order to express our freedom. It is a mistake, Nishitani claims, to sever the connection between law and freedom. If we conceive of humans as mere matter, we drift into the nihilism of meaningless materialism. If we conceive of humans as pure will, we drift into the nihilism of the isolated, solitary, and alienated “self” (p. 86). To avoid these “nihilisms,” we must avoid the dualism of thinking of life as one or the other. Thinking of human life as either pure matter or pure will grounds us in nihility: negative nothingness. If we recognize both “body and personality” (p. 90) as integral components of human life, then we can become receptive to sunyata.

The problem with nothingness as nihility is that it conceives of “nothingness” as a being, as an “abyss” (p. 96) that opens up beneath our existence, threatening to swallow up all significance and meaning. Nothingness as sunyata, however, is not some “thing” outside of or beneath our existence. “Rather, it is to be realized as something united to and self-identical with being” (p. 97). Nothingness in this sense is not separate from being, but always in a relationship with being. It is a kind of “emptiness.” It is “being-sive-nothingness.” Here, sive is used by Nishitani as a way to indicate that being and nothingness are always related and intertwined with one another. They are not related in the sense of a subject and an object, but as a kind of unity. He uses fire as an analogy in attempting to convey his point, explaining how fire as fire cannot burn itself, and thus fire is something that both burns and that does not burn. Its identity is not constituted by a subject related to object, or as a substance and its attributes, but as a process of combustion and non-combustion that coexist simultaneously (pp. 112 – 118). To me, this example was not really all that helpful. What did come to my mind as I read this part of the book was Sartre’s discussion of nothingness as a hole within Being. A hole is not a “thing” but a lack that exists only in relationship with that which it negates. For instance, the hole in a doughnut does not exist apart from the dough. Likewise, the nothingness of sunyata does not exist apart from Being, but interpenetrates Being just as Being interpenetrates nothingness. They are inseparable.

When we cease to think of our world in terms of substances or in terms of subjects and objects, we are opened to the possibility of encountering Being on the ground of emptiness rather than on the ground of nihility. But, Nishitani tells us, this encounter “cannot on the whole be expressed in the ordinary language of reason” (p. 124). This is because reason forces us to predicate one thing in terms of another, splitting the world up into subjects and objects. From the perspective of sunyata, however, the world is one, and when we stand on this “homeground,” the language we use to describe the experience becomes paradoxical. This is the “knowing of non-knowing…where things themselves are all gathered into one” (p. 140).

Nishitani introduces a diagram to illustrate this perspective, suggesting that in the traditional, Western way of experiencing the world, it is as if we have positioned ourselves within the center of a circle, looking outward toward the periphery. From this perspective, the boundaries of the circle seem fixed and finite. Yet, if we shift our perspective to take account of the the infinite array of tangents that touch upon, and pierce, the boundaries of the circle, we start to comprehend that the center of the circle is a center only from a static and fixed position. On the field of nihility, the infinite tangents appear scattered and disjointed. This is nihilism. A further shift to the field of sunyata, however, brings a new unity to our experience of diversity, as we conceive of the countless tangents as unfolding on “a void of infinite space, without limit or orientation” (p. 146). This allows us to comprehend a unity in the diversity before us. On the field of sunyata, the center is everywhere, and all things are what they are in their own uniqueness while also remaining connected to all other things. “Fire is not fire, therefore it is fire.” “…a self that is not itself in being itself, [is] a self that is not a self” (p. 165).

What is the relationship of nothingness to time and history? According to Nishitani, we find differing approaches to this question in Western and Eastern philosophy and religion. In Western Christian thought, time and history have been conceived as the “once and for all” (p. 206) creations of God. They are how God reveals meaning to humans. In this, history is thought to have a single direction and purpose. This, according to Nishitani, is connected to the intolerance of Christianity. There is no room for alternate meanings or agendas; only God’s singular purpose is real. Nishitani believes that the historical consciousness of Christianity is an important turning point in human thought, since it contributed to the non-religious, Western view of rational progress and the conviction that history has meaning. Nietzsche attempted to turn against this tradition by reintroducing the viewpoint of the Eternal Return, in which time and history go nowhere, looping round and round like a snake biting its own tail. Despite their apparent differences, however, both Christianity and Nietzsche’s views of time are nevertheless grounded in nihility rather than sunyata.

Christian eschatology teaches that the end of history occurs within history. The final judgement is supposed to be an event ushering in a transhistorical dimension, but this event is itself historical. So how can a transhistorical Truth become historical while still being transhistorical? Only because behind it stands a personal God. It is because “God is a being,” (p. 215), a transhistorical “other,” the creator of all time and history, that His will can be revealed historically. The same goes for Nietzsche, who replaces “the life giving power of the Will for the God of Christianity” (p. 216). This, ultimately, is why Western approaches to time and history lead to nihilism: instead of grounding all reality in a singular unity, they fracture reality into subject and object, self and other. In contrast, Nishitani advocates the perspective of Zen Buddhism, which posits time “without beginning or end” which “cannot be thought without the totality of relationships that make up the world” (p. 238). From this perspective, self-centeredness evaporates and all of our karmic activity becomes a kind of purposeless “play” (253). Self is non-self. Work is play. Samsara is nirvana. All apparent opposites collapse into one.

In the last pages of Religion and Nothingness, Nishitani sums up this perspective:

In brief, in the circumincessional relationship a field can be opened on which contradictory standpoints – where the other is seen as telos, and where the self is seen as telos; where the self serves others and makes itself a nothingness, and where the self remains forever the self itself – are both radicalized precisely by virtue of their being totally one. It is the field of the “knowing of non-knowing” that we spoke of as no different from the “being” itself of things themselves. It is also the field of absolute freedom. (p. 284)

Sunyata, the field of emptiness, is the productive nothingness that allows for the absorption of all the world’s conflicting elements into a singular unity. Instead of clearing away and nullifying reality – as is the case for relative nothingness, or nihility – sunyata gathers together reality. For this reason, whereas nihility results in alienation, disconnection, and meaninglessness, sunyata results in synthesis, interconnection. and profound meaning. This seems, ultimately, to be what recommends sunyata over nihility for Nishitani.

Religion and Nothingness is a very difficult book. I feel as if my understanding of it is slowly solidifying through continuing reflection and by drawing connections to existentialist works, like those by Sartre, that are more familiar to me. At this point, one very useful distinction from Nishitani’s book stands out to me: the distinction between the absolute, productive nothingness of sunyata and the relative, negative nothingness of nihility. This distinction does go a long way in helping to explain why it is that Western philosophy, beginning with the Presocratics, has sought to avoid grounding reality in nothingness. If it is assumed that “something cannot come from nothing,” then it would make sense that all things must be rooted in one underlying substance: a singular “something.” Eastern thought, which presumes nothingness as a creative and productive principle, however, need not explain all that exists in terms of a singular substance. This is very helpful in clarifying a fundamental difference between the Western and Eastern versions of metaphysics.

But why choose one set of assumptions over the other? Nishitani argues that the Western viewpoint leads to nihilism, and that this is sufficient to reject nothingness as nihility. For those of us who embrace nihilism, however, this argument won’t work. On the other hand, the fact that the logical use of language breaks down with sunyata might be enough to encourage some of us to reject this form of absolute nothingness as irrational. I’m currently left with the feeling that Nishitani leaves us on the horns of a dilemma:

Do you prefer to remain in the grips of nihilism or to lapse into irrationality?