Nishitani Keiji Quotes
Nishitani Keiji was a Japanese philosopher and one of the principal figures of the second generation of the Kyoto School. A student of Nishida Kitaro at Kyoto and of Heidegger at Freiburg, he combined Mahayana Buddhist thought, especially the Zen concept of emptiness, with the Western philosophical tradition in works such as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism and Religion and Nothingness. The quotes below are attributed to Nishitani Keiji, organized by topic.
Browse Nishitani Keiji by topic
Nishitani Keiji on God
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Attributed to Nishitani Keiji:
“Nihilism, properly understood, is the gateway to religion.”
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Attributed to Nishitani Keiji:
“Religion is the place where one comes to know oneself.”
Nishitani Keiji on Knowledge
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“In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism , demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process.”
Zen Skin, Zen Marrow (Oxford: 2008), p. 134. -
“Previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and exhaustive.”
p. 104. -
“Summarizing Nietzsche ’s views, p. 109.”
Through the sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions. -
“In principle, when we distinguish being from beings, we transcend the realm of things that are. It is not that we go to some other world beyond the world we know, or enter into some different realm of beings. Such notions constitute, for Heidegger, a vulgar form of metaphysics with which true philosophy (metaphysics as science) has nothing in common. Philosophy does not go beyond beings ontically to other beings that dwell beyond or behind. It transcends beings ontologically in the direction of being.”
p. 163. -
“Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahāyāna.”
p. 180.
Nishitani Keiji on Life
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“From the perspective of Buddhism, Sartre’s notion of existence, according to which one must create oneself continually in order to maintain oneself within nothing, remains a standpoint of attachment to the self – indeed, the most profound form of this attachment – and as such is caught in the self-contradiction this implies.”
p. 187.
Nishitani Keiji on Mind
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Attributed to Nishitani Keiji:
“Sunyata, emptiness, is the foundation of true selfhood.”
Nishitani Keiji on Nature
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“A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself.”
p. 188. -
“In the locus of emptiness, beyond the human standpoint, a world of "dependent origination" is opened up in which everything is related to everything else. Seen in this light, there is nothing in the world that arises from "self-power" and yet all "self-powered" workings arise from the world.”
p. 190.
Nishitani Keiji on Truth
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Attributed to Nishitani Keiji:
“Meaninglessness is the ground from which meaning grows.”
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Attributed to Nishitani Keiji:
“Only the standpoint of emptiness can hold together being and nothing.”
Nishitani Keiji on Virtue
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“Through the sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions.”
Summarizing Nietzsche ’s views, p. 109.