Conceptions of Nothingness in Asian Philosophy
While the history of Western philosophy began with concerns involving the primary constituents and fundamental nature of being and existence, the notion of nothingness or emptiness plays a central role in Asian philosophical traditions from the start. A variety of ideas about nothingness gained profound philosophical prominence in a number of South and East Asian lineages of thought in the course of their development, and have remained central for them to this day. In Buddhism, the notion of emptiness signifies the underlying nature of the process of change in the impermanent world and the ultimate truth about our transient existence. In Daoism, it is suggested that the word “wu (無, nothing or nonbeing)” may best characterize the origin of the entire cosmological order as well as the ontological grounding of our existence. In Hinduism, the ultimate and unitary nature of reality was often described negatively, as “not this and not that” with respect to all the differentiated phenomena that we could speak about, and yet as their shared innermost essence. In the view expressed by philosophers of the Japanese Kyoto School, the idea of Absolute Nothingness represents the root of the self and of the world. Furthermore, all these philosophical traditions employed ideas of nothingness not only to depict grand metaphysical principles, but also to explain things about everyday life, such as how we experience loss in our temporal and very ephemeral existence, how death is taken to be a form of nothingness, how space combined with matter forms physical things, how we can speak in terms of negation, and how we become aware that things are not where we were expecting to find them. The idea of nothingness or emptiness further develops into a philosophy of life. The philosophies of nothingness have, in addition, an ethical import and a transformative power. Once people understand that ultimate reality is nothingness or emptiness, they acquire levels of insight into their mundane existence that can profoundly change them. This insight, commonly spoken of as enlightenment, enables people to transcend their ordinary concerns in life. In all these respects, the major philosophical traditions of Asia propounded, though in markedly different ways, the view that, in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our experience, ideas of nothingness and emptiness must play a central role.
The collection of essays in this book brings together the work of twenty prominent scholars of Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Neo-Confucian, Japanese, and Korean thought to illuminate fascinating philosophical conceptualizations of nothingness and emptiness in both classical and modern Asian traditions. The collection is, in the current state of scholarly literature, unique in that it brings together a host of accomplished scholars to provide in concert a panoramic representation of the ways in which ideas of nothingness and emptiness played crucial roles in Asian traditions. These essays offer both traditional and contemporary analyses, sometimes putting various Asian systems of thought into dialogue with one another and sometimes with classical and modern Western philosophers. This combined effort will benefit everyone in the fields of Asian and comparative philosophy who recognizes the great importance of these philosophical resonances of nothingness.
As Douglas L. Berger points out in his contribution to this volume that “there was never a homogeneous view of the notion of ‘nothingness’ in classical Asian thought, and that, instead, the idea was the topic of pointed debate and adjudged from many different perspectives” (Chapter 12). In this volume, we will see formulations as varied as those which depict emptiness as the very nature of existence, nothingness as a depiction of indeterminacy and form-lessness, nonbeing as the ontological grounding for being, nothingness as the space in concrete things, emptiness as a psychological state of an ideal moral agent, and emptiness as metaphorically represented by the image of the sky in our aesthetic appreciation and spiritual elevation. In some cases, the idea of nothingness also takes on the role of providing explanations for more common phenomena, such as the absence of things in certain places, or the linguistic forms that make negations function intelligibly in our understanding. Indeed, as the reader peruses these chapters, the wide range of the notion’s philosophical significance will become clear. If there is, however, a common theme that emerges from the following essays, it is that nothingness is not a thing and cannot be conceived to exist in the same manner in which other concrete material substances exist. To make ontological commitment to nothingness would be to turn nothing into something.
Even though not a self-subsisting thing or state of affairs, nothingness is nonetheless a distinctly identifiable constituent of our world, and may be happened upon through empirical, logical, semantic, existential, and reflective approaches. Nothingness is, therefore, very much part and parcel of the makeup of the world. The world is not simply “everything that exists,” as some contemporary realists take as their starting assumption. In contrast, the views presented in this volume take negative facts, absences, nothingness, and emptiness as furniture of the world. It is this fundamental conviction, that nothingness is both experienced and known by us and is inherent in the very nature of things as well as our own natures, that authors in this collection share. Nothingness cannot be posited, but neither should it be dismissed, in our ontology. These essays will help make the traditions they represent valuable participants in the ongoing work of philosophical inquiry and dialogue on the nature of the world.
Part I of this book focuses on the notion of emptiness in Brāhmiṇical and Early Buddhist Traditions. The collection opens with Arindam Chakrabarti’s “The Unavoidable Void: Nonexistence, Absence, and Emptiness,” which offers philosophical reflections on such concepts as lack, absence, emptiness, and no-self. Chakrabarti examines the treatment (or suspicion) of negative facts in Western and Indian philosophical traditions. He points out that “the observable world around us is replete with real lacks”: holes, gaps, space, blanks, and the like. In terms of action and event, we also have avoidance, omission, negligence, negation, and inaction. And yet, metaphysicians are reluctant to list absences as part of the furniture of the world. To Chakrabarti, the source of this reluctance to entertain negative facts is that these metaphysicians conflate not-Being with those ontologically notorious nonbeings such as the Gold Mountain or Pegasus. Chakrabarti argues that the former expresses a fact of something’s not being there or not being the case, which is nonetheless a part of reality, while the latter, as a creation of the language game, is simply unreal and belongs to the fictional realm. In this chapter, he discusses four arguments against our making ontological commitment to negative facts, and repudiates each. He argues that we must give negative facts their proper status in the world: absences are objectively present in the world, and negative facts have their corresponding truth makers based on positive entities and their relations. As Chakrabarti puts it, the world is simply “the totality of positive and negative facts.”
Even though there are absences as negative facts, one should be careful not to allow spurious absences into our ontological landscape. Chakrabarti presents the logic of absence as formulated in the Indian Nyāya school. Nyāya logic takes absence to be delimited and qualified by its counterpart, the present existences of particular things. We can make sense of our discourse of absences, because these real absences are absences of existent things and we can understand them through those existent things. If, on the other hand, we are talking about absences in their own right, such as fictional entities and non-existent things, then such absences are simply spurious.
At the end of this chapter, Chakrabarti turns to the psychology of absences— emptying one’s self—as discussed by Wittgenstein, Bhattacharya, Descartes, and Bergson. All these philosophers were interested in the phenomenology of the self’s lack—for example, in the self’s lack of a particular experience. Chakrabarti points out that even in negative introspective reports, such as the claim “I have no pain,” what is negated is the positive experience—in this case, the experience of pain. There is no positing of any chimerical “no-pain” when one wishes to discuss the absence of pain. In other words, what is being negated, the negatum, is the reference of a negative report. One can speak of the non-existence of something by negating the presence of that something without making any ontological commitment to its absence. Even in the denial of the self’s existence, as proclaimed by nihilism of the self, there is still a full presence of the self as the locus of this denial. The self cannot be annihilated. Chakrabarti’s conclusion represents an underlying theme of this collection: “the idea of absolute naught is a self-destructive pseudo-idea, ‘a mere word’.”
In Chapter 2, “Semantics of Nothingness,” Sthaneshwar Timalsina introduces the prominent Hindu grammarian Bhartṛhari’s philosophy of negation. Bhartṛhari takes a linguistic approach to nothingness and focuses on the grammar of sentential negation. Timalsina explains the debate between particularists and wholists in Indian philosophies of language: the former claim that sentential meaning is constituted by the meaning of the words in the sentence; the latter maintain that sentential meaning is primary and indivisible. He groups Bhartṛhari in the wholist camp. According to Timalsina, Bhartṛhari’s semantics of negation is that the negative particle nañ in Sanskrit functions as a way to prohibit what has been postulated by its referent rather than to posit the referent’s non-existence. The semantics of negation is crucial to Bhartṛhari’s conception of reality because he takes the negative particle to indicate not nonexistence but the denial that a particularly existing thing possesses agency in a present case. This is important in the context of the linguistic debates that Bhartṛhari was engaged in because, if the negative particle were understood to have an independent meaning, then its general sense of “non-existence” would create a relation between it and the particular thing that it negates, which can only be identified precisely because it exists. Therefore, associating negation with action and the particularization, in both the compound word and sentential contexts, is not only necessary to explain how sentences can meaningfully negate, but is also essential for Bhratṛhari’s metaphysics of being. Bhratṛhari believes that Brahman, immutable existence, underlies all things and manifests itself and its differentiations primarily in language. And so, to prevent the implication that some intimation that absolute non-existence could be referred to by the negative particle, it is necessary for us to work out how such a particle does not in fact itself refer to non-existence, but helps, given its semantic function, to particularize non-existence in terms of the things that we know to exist. In general, Bhartṛhari believes that language can truthfully describe a thing-in-itself, and the language of negation always accompanies the thing that is being negated. In other words, negation only negates something that exists, not some non-existent thing. Timalsina concludes that Bhartṛhari’s logic invites us to see negation not as totally negative, but as partial affirmation of something else that exists.
In Chapter 3, “Madhyamaka, Nihilism, and the Emptiness of Emptiness,” Jay L. Garfield defends a realist reading of Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. Nāgārjuna’s core thesis of the emptiness of ultimate existence has often been interpreted as professing nihilism. According to Garfield’s reading, however, Nāgārjuna’s philosophy reveals a “decidedly realistic attitude” toward worldly phenomena. Garfield’s argument is based on a careful analysis of Nāgārjuna’s logic—a particular form of Buddhist logic called ‘catuṣkoti’, according to which there are four possibilities for the truth value of a proposition: true, false, both true and false, neither true nor false. This logic is of course at odds with the principle of bivalence in classical logic, in which a proposition is either determinately true or false, and nothing else in between. In Nāgārjuna’s view, the world is in flux, and cannot be neatly divided into facts and non-facts. We need semantics to capture a wider logical space than what bivalent logic can proffer. The four-value logic reflects the transient and ambivalent nature of things—as soon as something is asserted, it is denied; as soon as someone asserts something, someone else might reject it.
The ultimate goal of Nāgārjuna’s teaching, according to Garfield, is to highlight the non-insistence on any ultimate nature, including emptiness itself. If Nāgārjuna were to assert that emptiness is the true nature of things, as nihilists do, then the true nature of things would cease to be empty, since it now has a designation, a mode of existence. In this sense, ‘emptiness’ does not really mean unqualified emptiness, as nothing can be called “emptiness” itself. Garfield suggests a reading offered by Tsongkhapa, according to which the concept empty is parameterized as “empty of.” Worldly phenomena are empty of intrinsic nature, since their existence is causally interdependent and their natures, or properties, are relational to our cognitive capacities and our linguistic conventions. There is no ultimate reality in addition to our phenomenal world, as our phenomenal world is as real as it gets. Garfield summarizes Nāgārjuna’s thesis as: “nothing is ultimately real, not even emptiness.” Hence, he calls this view “the emptiness of emptiness.”
In Chapter 4, “In Search of the Semantics of Emptiness,” Koji Tanaka endorses Garfield’s interpretation that ‘emptiness’ in Nāgārjuna’s usage does not mean nothingness, and focuses on what it does mean. Tanaka argues that Nāgārjuna’s thesis of emptiness is not merely an ontological claim about the nature of existence, but also a semantic thesis about the nature of truth. Nāgārjuna advocates the doctrine of “two truths”: conventional truth and ultimate truth. In Tanaka’s interpretation, the principle of truth presented in traditional Abhi-dharma literature adopts something like a modern Russellian approach. Russell takes the object referred to as a component of a proposition, and propositional truth is determined directly in relation to its reference, not mediated through any Fregean sense. Any statement about a fictional object, such as “Pegasus has wings,” would simply be false since it has no corresponding object as its referent. The two truths doctrine advocated by the Ābhidharmikas separates ultimate truth from conventional truth: ultimate truth is about ultimate reality, which to them consists of nothing but the simplest, unanalyzable, partless entities. Conventional truths, on the other hand, are about composite things, which are ultimately unreal, but exist only according to the conventional view. According to Tanaka, Nāgārjuna seems to embrace this reference-based semantic principle of truth when he inherits the two truths doctrine from the Ābhidharmika. If this is indeed the principle of truth to which Nāgārjuna subscribes, however, then there is a paradox of taking about “the emptiness of emptiness” itself: since emptiness is not real, any statement about it must not be true. Nāgārjuna would then be barred by his own principle to speak of emptiness, not to mention from uttering an ultimate truth about emptiness.
We have seen in Chapter 3 that Garfield’s solution to this seeming paradox is to attribute a paraconsistent logic to Nāgārjuna, so Nāgārjuna can be saying things that are both true and false, or neither true nor false. Tanaka is not satisfied with this solution. His own solution is to suggest a couple of new semantic theories of truth for Nāgārjuna. The first one is a deflationary theory, which Nāgārjuna’s commentator Candrakīrti allegedly endorses. According to the deflationary theory of truth, truth is not some special property over and above a statement itself, which says something about the world. If the world is as the statement claims, then that statement is true. Tanaka attributes such a view to Candrakīrti, since the latter claims that what is true is simply “what is acknowledged by the world.” Extending Candrakīrti’s view of truth to Nāgārjuna’s own dilemma of stating truth that cannot be stated, Tanaka argues that Nāgārjuna was not really making any ontological statement about the nature of emptiness. In other words, instead of saying, as Garfield does, that Nāgārjuna’s statement about emptiness has multivalent truth values, Tanaka interprets it as having no independent truth value. In a related vein, Tanaka suggests that Nāgārjuna could also be employing a pragmatic theory of truth. If the ultimate truth is nowhere to be found, what Nāgārjuna can still do is to use statements about ultimate truth as expedients to make people believe in the nonexistence of ultimate truth. The simple lesson in Nāgārjuna’s ontological paradox, according to Tanaka, is thus: Don’t worry about the existence of emptiness or how we can make any true statement about things that do not exist. What is said or not said is merely a way to get people to see the operation of emptiness in life.
Chapter 5, “Madhyamaka Emptiness and Buddhist Ethics,” by Mark Siderits expands the ontological and semantic dimensions of the concept of emptiness into ethics. Siderits agrees with both Garfield and Tanaka that Nāgārjuna does not advocate metaphysical nihilism, and he aims to further defend the thesis that moral nihilism should not be attributed to Nāgārjuna either. According to Siderits, the basic teaching of Indian Buddhist ethics is that the suffering of existence originates in our ignorance of the nature of existence. The Mahāyāna further advocate the path of the bodhisattva, one who has great compassion for all sentient beings and strives for the cessation of their suffering. If Mahāyāna in general, and Madhyamaka in particular, teaches that all things are empty in the sense that all things are devoid of intrinsic nature, then suffering must also be empty. Why should one care about others’ suffering if suffering is not ultimately real? In other words, if suffering is empty, then why would a bodhisattva be compassionate toward the suffering of others? Hence, theoretically there seems to be a conflict between the Madhyamaka metaphysical claim and its ethical doctrine. Mādhyamikas must therefore establish a connection between emptiness and compassion in order to justify their ethical teaching of great compassion. Siderits examines three separate strategies for linking the two concepts, and points out difficulties with each. His own proposal is to appeal to an argument in Śāntideva’s (eighth century CE) Bodhicaryāvatāra, in which an enduring self is temporally and hypothetically posited even though no such self could possibly ultimately exist. Siderits argues that implicit in this argument is what he calls “semantic contextualism,” the view that meaning is contextualized and the same expression could mean different things from context to context. The teaching of emptiness, in the metaphysical context, explicates the absence of any intrinsic nature in all phenomena, including suffering. However, in the ethical context or in the context of practical reasoning, an expedient teaching is devised to claim that suffering is real and is intrinsically bad. Therefore, the Madhyamaka can still preach the emptiness of all things, while at the same time advocating impartial compassion for the “genuine” suffering of all sentient beings. The metaphysical claim and the ethical claim are thus not in conflict on the semantic level.
While Siderits focuses on the connection between the Madhyamaka teaching of emptiness and its ethical teaching of compassion, in Chapter 6, “Emptiness and Violence,” Chen-kuo Lin deals with the seeming contradiction between the doctrine of emptiness and the notion of harm. According to Lin, Nāgārjuna, his disciple Āryadeva (third century), as well as a later advocate of the Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Mādhyamika school Kamalaśīla (eighth century) all suffered violent deaths. Lin raises the question: how is the issue of violence accounted for in terms of the philosophy of emptiness? Lin suggests that on the realist reading, emptiness is taken to be absence of agency, absence of the self, absence of the doer and the doing, and even absence of existence. Therefore, in the case of violent death, both the murderer and the victim are empty: there is no one who harms or who is harmed. This interpretation can easily lead to moral nihilism—the good, the bad, the victim, and the assailant, all are empty. As Garfield, Tanaka, and Siderits do in previous chapters, Lin also argues against a nihilist reading of Nāgārjuna’s metaphysics and ethics. He points out that what Nāgārjuna rejects is not existence itself, but such notions as essence, intrinsic nature, substance, and self-nature.
Lin engages in a comparative study of Nāgārjuna and two Continental philosophers, Derrida and Levinas, in order to highlight a deconstructive reading of the notion of violence that is shared by all three philosophers. In Lin’s analysis, the ultimate form of violence is not physical, but linguistic—language itself poses the most severe form of violence on all beings since language carves up things, creating dichotomies between selves and Others, this and that, sameness or difference. Language creates distinctions and oppositions, and this is the very foundation of other forms of violence. Lin argues that Nāgārjuna treats language as “empty in itself,” which is erroneously assumed to stand opposite to the world, as if it could “match” or “correspond to” the world as it is. A direct reference theory, for example, would presuppose a realist picture of the world—names refer to things that exist on their own, separate from everything else. However, under Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness, nothing exists independently of anything else. Therefore, to use language to talk about things in the world is already committing violence against things. A second commonality among all three philosophers, according to Lin, is their denunciation of the form of metaphysics that posits substance or transcendental realm. For Levinas, Heidegger’s ontological distinction between a transcendent Being and the empirical existents has committed yet another kind of “ontological violence”—a subjugation of individuals to the impersonal. Lin argues that Levinas advocates a return to ethical relationships from abstract ontology, and this would have been Nāgārjuna’s main tenet as well. In this hermeneutic context, emptiness is interpreted, not as a metaphysical or ontological thesis of the “true nature” of things, but as an ethical teaching about finding one’s original face, the naked experience prior to any conceptual proliferation or linguistic differentiation, which is the ultimate form of violence against all things as well as to one’s original face.
From the negativity attributed to language, we turn to a related topic: how is language possible if its subject matter is empty? The next three papers delve into yet another paradox involving the notion of emptiness—how could one possibly speak of nothing or that which is empty? In Chapter 7, “Speaking of the Ineffable …,” Graham Priest examines the paradoxical issue of how one can say what nothing is when this very statement would simply turn nothing into something that is. Furthermore, if the claim is that ultimate reality is emptiness, as Nāgārjuna proclaims, or nothingness, as Daoism advocates, then one cannot even speak of ultimate reality, or Truth, for that matter. Silence would then seem to be the only correct path. Priest gives a helpful overview of the ubiquitous difficulty involving the ineffability of nothingness in some Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophies. He also points out how the struggle to deal with the ineffability of ultimate reality is prevalent in Western traditions—in the works of Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, to name a few. To say that ultimate reality (emptiness, Dao, nothingness) is beyond our perception, conception, and description; that it transcends our cognitive capacities; or simply to say that it is ineffable, is already saying something about it. The ineffability of the ineffable ultimate reality would thus seem to be a problem with no solution.
However, Priest argues that catuṣkoti logic (previously discussed in Chapter 3) can be deployed to enable one to speak of the ineffable. In addition to the four possibilities described earlier—that statements are true, false, both, or neither—later thinkers appear to have added a fifth possibility, which seems to be some kind of ineffability, though how this is to be understood precisely is not so clear. Priest provides an understanding using the techniques of contemporary non-classical logic. First Degree Entailment is a well-known four valued logic in which sentences are assigned one of the values true, false, both, or neither. In Priest’s reinterpretation, it is states of affairs that are assigned such values. It now makes sense to add a fifth value: the value possessed by a state of affairs that is ineffable. To illustrate how this is possible, Priest relates the issue to contemporary discussions of the paradoxes of self-reference. Paradoxes of denotation, such as Berry’s paradox, use the Denotation Schema Den (‘t.” x) iff x = t (where t is any noun phrase). Write n for nothing; then since nothing is no thing (no object), there is no x such that x = n, so there is x such that Den (‘n.” x). Nothing lacks a name, so one can say nothing about it. But of course, n = n, so Den (‘n.” n). Now nothing does have a name, n, and one can use this to say something about it. We can thus talk of this ineffable thing.1
In Chapter 8, “Emptiness as Subject-Object Unity,” Chien-hsing Ho extends the Madhyamaka analysis of the notion of emptiness to a Chinese Mādhyamika philosopher, Sengzhao (374?−414 CE). In particular, Ho focuses on the relationship between language and reality in Sengzhao’s philosophy. In correspondence with the “two realities” (the conventional and the ultimate) posited by the Madhyamaka school, Ho distinguishes the ontic (designating conventional conceptions) and the ontological (designating true nature) levels of existence. On the ontic level, our language and our conceptions inevitably fail to capture the true nature of things, as they carve reality at the wrong joints. Things conventionally conceived are individuated and differentiated; ultimately, however, all things are unified into an indeterminable and undifferentiated whole. In Ho’s analysis, Sengzhao’s conception of emptiness is simply “ontic indeterminacy,” as Ho puts it, “to be empty is to be devoid of determinate form and nature.” As soon as we apply any linguistic term to designate a thing, we leave out not only the thing’s unique features but also the thing’s commonality with other things not designated by this term. In this way, not only is nothingness itself ineffable, as we see in Priest’s discussion, everything is ultimately ineffable. A specific mistake in our conventional linguistic demarcation of things is that we suppose existence and nonexistence to be mutually exclusive, and we embrace the law of the excluded middle. According to Sengzhao, what a thing is and what it is not are interdependent: if we don’t know what it is not, we cannot even say what it is. In general, opposites have “notional codependence,” as Ho calls it. Given this, we can now see why everything is linguistically and conventionally interdependent and hence lacking a definitive nature. In the sense of not having determinate and definitive existence, all things are empty.
On the ontological level, furthermore, even ultimate reality itself is empty. Ho introduces an interesting point that Sengzhao emphasizes: even the designation ‘emptiness’ is itself a conceptual construct, and our enlightened understanding that things are ultimately indeterminate ends up being our conceptual grasp of indeterminacy per se. Therefore, what we need to accomplish is not a different or even ultimate conception of truth; we simply need to return to a “pre-conceptual” state. According to Ho’s analysis, ultimate Truth does not lie elsewhere— there is no separation between conventional and ultimate reality. Ultimate Truth is a state of mind in which there is no longer any distinction between the subject and the object, no interior and exterior, no “mind-independent reality,” and the subject is one with the pre-conceptual world as an “amorphous lump,” as Ho puts it. This mental state is termed nirvāṇa by Sengzhao. This is the true meaning of emptiness in Sengzhao’s philosophy, and yet at the same time it resists being defined as such. Emptiness is ineffable, because it simply is the state of ineffability.
Chapter 9 by Rajam Raghunathan, “On Nothing in Particular: Delimiting Not Being for Knowing’s Sake,” tackles the assertion of the ineffability of emptiness in Madhyamaka philosophy from a comparative standpoint. To highlight the universal difficulty of speaking of nothing or that which is not, Raghunathan begins her paper with introducing the analysis of not-Being (the negation of being as such) in early Greek philosophy—from Parmenides to Aristotle. Parmenides points out that what does not exist cannot be thought of or spoken about, since there is nothing to think of or to speak about. Taking the verb is (estin) as the starting point, Parmenides examines the subject of this verb—what can be said to be or not to be, and concludes that the subject cannot possibly be nothing. Raghunathan analyzes the verb used in a predicative sense (x is F) and in an existential sense (x is or x exists), and suggests different possible scenarios for each sense. A thing could be determinately F or indeterminately F; a thing could definitely or indefinitely exist. For example, a table is determinately a table while a heap of sand is only indeterminately (i.e. vaguely) a heap; President Obama definitely exists while Hamlet only indefinitely exists. According to Raghunathan, Parmenides only acknowledges the possibility of knowledge for that which exists definitely and determinately (what he calls “Being”); that which exists definitely but indeterminately (such as Highway 1 or towns and cities); and that which exists indefinitely but determinately (such as numbers). On the other hand, Parmenides denies that one can possibly know that which exists indefinitely and indeterminately—the negation of “being” (estin) in both the predicative and the existential sense is simply “not-Being.” In this analysis, we can see, as Raghunathan points out, that Parmenides’ conception of not-Being is close to Sengzhao’s emptiness on the ontological level, namely, it is indeterminate and indefinite. The difference is that for Parmenides, we cannot think of, speak about or even have any knowledge of not-Being, whereas for Sengzhao, it is only through knowing beings as indeterminate not-Beings that we gain enlightenment. Raghunathan also examines Parmenides’ categorical rejection of the possibility of speaking of the ineffable in the comparative framework of Nāgārjuna’s and the Vimalakīrti Sūtra’s methods of resolving the paradox of speaking of that which is unspeakable. This comparative study, she suggests, may open the door to deeper reflections on a common approach to the notion of not-Being and of emptiness: the ultimate reason for our inability to speak of or know about not-Being lies in its formlessness, indefiniteness and indeterminacy.
Chapter 10 by Zhihua Yao, “The Cognition of Nonexistent Objects,” continues to investigate the possibility of knowledge of nonbeing according to the Yogācāra school; in particular, he lists five arguments developed by the Yogācāra Buddhists in support of the claim that one can know or have consciousness of nonexistent things. Nonexistent things, from the Yogācāran perspective, include macro-objects composed of existing elements, as well as conceptual entities (thought, ideas, etc.) that are not graspable by the five senses. Argument one deals with the past and the future, which do not exist according to the Yogācāras. Yao argues that the Yogācārins embrace presentism, the view that only the present is real. Since they also acknowledge that the mind can have consciousness of past and the future phenomena, they are asserting the possibility of the knowledge of nonexistent things. In his reformulation of Yogācāra’s second argument, Yao explains that since the mind’s consciousness can have nonexistent things as its intentional objects, and intention presupposes cognition, the mind can cognize such things even though they do not exist. In both these arguments, Yao identifies “consciousness” or “cognition” with “knowledge” and concludes that the mind can therefore know nonexistent things. The third argument deals with no-self and impermanence. Yao explains that, according to the Yogācārins, the mind can comprehend both the fact that the substantial self does not exist, and the fact that a permanent entity does not exist. Inferring from the claim there is no self, the mind can derive the concept of no-self; based on the claim all phenomena are impermanent, the mind can thereby be consciously aware of impermanence. Argument four is based on the received view that only basic elements of sensible things truly exist, which Yao calls “atomistic realism,” and concludes that ordinary macro-objects such as food and drink do not truly exist. The Yogācārins acknowledge that the mind can have consciousness of food and drink; hence, by implication, the mind can cognize these non-existent things. Finally, argument five is made to distance Yogācāra philosophy from nihilism, which would deny all existences. Yao interprets Yogācāra’s theory of truth as a correspondence theory, for which the correctness of judgments is what matches existent things. And yet, he argues, the Yogācārins allow for cognition, and hence knowledge, of nonexistent things. Yao concludes that the Yogācāra theory of knowledge is more suitably viewed as a theory of intentionality, which gives the mind and its consciousness a more active role than in the traditional theory of perception.
Part II of this book includes essays on Chinese Daoism, Korean Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism, and the philosophy of the Japanese Kyoto School. A common theme that emerges in several chapters in Part II is that nothingness is to be rendered as the absence of determination, of designation, of limitation, of boundary; in general, it is to be formless. As John Krummel writes in his contribution to this volume, Nishida’s observation of the East-West philosophical orientations is that “reality for the West is grounded in being qua form, while reality for the East is grounded in the nothing as formless” (Chapter 18). If formlessness is a core theme in the philosophy of nothingness, then ‘nothingness’ does not denote any entity or any particular state of affairs; rather, it is descriptive of an ideal state that can be manifested in the world at large as well as in human existence. Hence, the concept of nothingness in these schools is inextricably tied up with human existence located in various sociopolitical contexts and the impermanent world. The discussions in these essays focus less on the paradoxical nature of the realness of nothingness, the semantics of speaking of the ineffable, or the epistemology of perceiving what is imperceptible. Instead, we have the ethics of nothingness, the psychology of forgetting the self or the embodiment of nothingness, the cultivation of a mental void in which one becomes thoughtless, the mutual determination of the self and the world in existential negation as well as the affirmation of meaning, and the mental release derived from the appreciation of the image of the sky, which symbolizes emptiness. Nothingness is immanent in our world and a mode of our existence; it should further be incorporated into our mental lives and become a paradigm of ethical practice.
In Chapter 11, “The Notion of Wu or Nonbeing as the Root of the Universe and a Guide for Life,” Xiaogan Liu gives a detailed analysis of the concept wu (non-being or nothing) in the Daodejing and summarizes four major senses of wu. According to Liu, in the Daodejing, the concept of Being (you) could denote some primary and general stuff of existence, and he thinks this stuff is qi. The concept wu, on the other hand, denotes nothingness or non-being, from which Being emerges. Liu suggests that in the Daodejing’s usage, wu in the sense of designating the initial status of the universe could be identified with Dao. In another usage, however, wu represents one aspect of Dao—the aspect of imperceptibility, ineffability, and incomprehensibility from the human perspective. We might call the former the cosmological sense of wu and the latter the epistemic sense of wu. The third sense of wu applies to the presence of space or vacancy in the empirical world. Without an internal empty space, a room cannot be a room and a vessel cannot contain anything. The functions of wu are multifold in material things. Liu points out that this sense of wu is neither metaphysical nor epistemic. We may call it the relative sense of wu. Last but not least is the sense of wu as denoting the ultimate Dao that is both transcendent and immanent. Liu argues that WANG Bi introduced this sense of wu in his commentary on the Daodejing, while the original author(s) may not have intended wu in this sense. Under WANG Bi’s philosophical development, wu came to signify an abstract Non-being, which stands both as the grounding and the origin of the universe. Non-being in WANG Bi’s philosophical reconstruction of the Daodejing takes up an ontological dimension, as the original state and the post-existence state of any concrete thing. However, Liu thinks that the temporal phases between concrete things and their non-being should not be seen as transitions in a physical process, but should be taken spiritually and metaphorically. The concept of non-being in WANG Bi’s philosophy denotes the ontological grounding for existence—being must be grounded in non-being, since multiplicity is not possible without a unifying One and nothing can exist without an underlying Non-being.
Liu further points out that despite the various usages and connotations of the concept wu in the Daodejing, the Daodejing’s overarching aim is to construct an ethics based on this notion. Liu describes it as an ethics of a negative direction but with a positive ideal. The negativity is aimed at contemporary social practices and values, and Liu argues that both Laozi as the author of the Daodejing, and WANG Bi as its most innovative commentator, were very much social critics, cultural reformists and spiritual idealists. The ethics based on the concept of wu in the sense of negation teaches us to look beyond our mundane affairs and trivial concerns. If things are fundamentally derived from, and will ultimately return to, the state of nothingness or non-being, then our temporary existence along with its sorrows and joys should no longer be our primary concern.
In “The Relation of Nothing and Something,” Douglas L. Berger focuses on the concept of wu in Chapter 11 of the Daodejing, as this conception offers the most applicable rendition of nothingness in human life. Using Xiaogan Liu’s analysis in the previous chapter, we can say that the concept wu in this chapter of the Daodejing is the relative sense of wu in the empirical world. Nothingness (wu) in this context is part of the physical world, and as Berger puts it, nothingness is “literally built into the structure of physical phenomena.” However, this brief Chapter 11 of the Daodejing has received multifarious interpretations both historically and in the contemporary world, making it one of the most controversial chapters in the whole text. Berger selects two representative analyses of Chapter 11 given by WANG Bi and ZHONG Hui, both prominent Daoists in the third-century CE. According to Berger, both of them take the sense of wu (nothingness) in the empirical world to signify space, and their shared interpretation enables us to see how the concept of nothingness could be employed in our physical construction and appreciation of concrete things. On the other hand, however, Wang and Zhong differ in their understanding of the connection between nothingness (wu) and existence (you): whereas Wang is a foundationalist, Zhong takes a relational approach, and Berger argues for the latter conception.
According to Berger, WANG Bi takes nothingness to be the foundation of concrete existence—this sense of nothingness is what Xiaogan Liu calls “the ground” in the previous chapter. The particular space within each concrete thing, where nothing is located, is what grounds the particular thing and its functions. Berger explains that we typically think of matter as constituting material things, and WANG Bi’s point is that without the spaces in between matter, material things cannot have their functions. Therefore, particular nothingness, namely, space, is the foundation of the usefulness of concrete things. In WANG Bi’s philosophy of nothingness, according to Berger’s analysis, the particular nothingness is connected to the cosmological sense of wu, namely, the infinitely indeterminate Nothingness that is the originary state of all existence. Therefore, existence, or the generation of something, does not wipe out nothingness; it merely dissects nothingness, confining it into local spaces. Nothingness is thus foundational for both the universe and particular things. This analysis seems to agree with the overall theme of the Daodejing. Interestingly, however, WANG Bi’s contemporary ZHONG Hui came up with a different analysis of the relationship between concrete matter and particularized nothingness. Berger explains that ZHONG Hui gives a contextualist reading of the usefulness of a thing—a particular thing’s functions depend on its conventional economic and social values rather than merely on its internal structure. Under Zhong’s reading, both the constitutive matter and the particularized nothingness (the space in concrete things) have to depend on each other for a thing to be useful. Thus, nothingness is not foundational, but is rather reliant on the concrete you (being) as an interdependent and mutually supportive pair. This second interpretation of the role of particularized nothingness, in Berger’s assessment, gives a more cogent account of the empirical placement of wu. Nothingness is no longer a mysterious abstract construct, but an in-the-world necessity in the material construction as well as practical functions of concrete things. This conception of particularized nothingness as space, according to Berger, renders space as a “mode of nothingness.” Understanding wu in this way may help us better understand the connection between the Daoist notion of nothingness and the Buddhist notion of emptiness, since both ‘space’ and’emptiness’ are expressed by the Chinese word kong.
In Chapter 13, “Was There Something in Nothingness?” JeeLoo Liu focuses on the cosmological sense of wu in classical Daoists texts. Liu argues that the Daoist cosmology is fundamentally based on its theory of qi, and since qi is something, albeit a formless something, classical Daoist texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi do not posit a cosmic void as the initial state of the Universe. Using contemporary philosophical analysis, she also argues that neither Laozi nor Zhuangzi makes an ontological commitment to nothingness. WANG Bi, on the other hand, turns the cosmogonic speculation of wu into an ontological foundationalist theory of wu, which in this context denotes an overarching Nonbeing. Liu explains that even though traditionally Neo-Confucians take themselves to oppose the Daoist theory of wu, what they actually oppose are the ethical implications derived from WANG Bi’s conception of nonbeing rather than the Daodejing’s conception of nothingness. In terms of their cosmogonies, Neo-Confucian qi-theorists such as ZHOU Dunyi and ZHANG Zai, and ancient Daoists in the Daodejing and in the Zhuangzi, have nothing but a terminological dispute about whether formlessness should be called “wu.” At the end of this chapter, Liu engages in an analytic philosophical critique to suggest that WANG Bi’s ontological commitment to Non-being is ill-grounded.
In Chapter 14, “Heart-Fasting, Forgetting, and Using the Heart Like a Mirror,” Chris Fraser probes the ethical as well as the psychological dimensions of the philosophy of emptiness in the Zhuangzi. Fraser takes “ethics” in a Foucauldian sense, according to which ethics is more than a set of normative directives regarding one’s lifestyle and conduct; rather, it involves the agent’s self constitution and self-realization. Fraser argues that the ideal self in the Zhuangzi would be one entertaining the psychological state of emptiness—without preconceptions, without insistence, and with total equanimity as well as spontaneity that flows with situational demands. Such a psychological state, according to Fraser, is partly due to the agent’s cognitive as well as affective identification with nature and the changing conditions in life. Fraser also stresses the connection between the concept of qi and the Zhuangzi’s notion of emptiness (xu), and he too argues that emptiness does not refer to nothingness, non-existence, or an absolute void. He thinks that in the Zhuangzi, emptiness (xu) should be understood as the absence of fixed forms. In cultivating the psychological state of emptiness, one is to emulate the fluidity and the insubstantiality of qi in one’s response to daily affairs and external objects. This is the virtue of receptivity, which has the loss of self-insistence and even self-awareness as a prerequisite. In this way, the way to self-cultivation is actually to empty the self—in the Zhuangzi’s terminology, it is to have the mind be “like a mirror,” responding to things as they appear but leaving no trace after things pass. As Fraser points out, the ethics of emptiness in the Zhuangzi is not psychological nothingness, but is grounded in practiced skills. The aim is to cultivate a greater sensitivity to changing circumstances and to deal with things with open-minded composure. This philosophy of life can help us become more receptive to unforeseen turns of events, alternative possibilities, and diverse ethics. In this way, the Daoist ethics of emptiness does not need to recommend a life of negativity and passivity as we have seen in Wei-Jin Daoists; rather, it can affirm multiple ethical spaces for individuals.
In Chapter 15, “Embodying Nothingness and the Ideal of the Affectless Sage in Daoist Philosophy,” Alan K. L. Chan continues the discussion on the Daoist ethics of nothingness. Chan calls a Daoist sage someone who “embodies nothingness,” and explains that the embodiment of nothingness is manifested in multiple ways: in the Daodejing, it is the absence of desire as well as the absence of active striving (wu wei, 無為); in the Zhuangzi, it is manifested “affectless” (wu qing, 無情)—the absence of emotions or affective responses to things. However, in this chapter Chan focuses on the third century CE Wei-Jin Neo-Daoists’ views for his detailed analysis of “the sage’s embodiment of nothingness.” In HE Yan’s conception, the ideal agent, the sage, is endowed with a special disposition to be free from affective disturbance of the mind. This special disposition, inborn in the sage, is marked by a perfect “harmony (zhonghe, 中和)” of all emotions and affective responses. In other words, the sage does not lack emotion; he or she simply has the perfect balance of emotions, not achieved through effort but is inborn by nature. The sage is thus one born with the “undifferentiated completeness” of affective responses to the world. Sagehood becomes an unreachable ethical goal, a trait that is given, but not accessible to others through self-cultivation.
Chan explains that to HE Yan’s contemporary, WANG Bi, the possibility of becoming a sage through self-cultivation must be affirmed. WANG Bi por trays the sage’s embodiment of nothingness as a spiritual luminosity, which is a heightened state of perfect harmony of desires and emotions. In a later Neo-Daoist GUO Xiang’s conception, the sage’s embodiment of nothingness is achievable through an active oblivion of attachments. The sage “forgets,” as it were, not as the result of any deliberate effort in suppressing emotion or desire. Rather, forgetting affectivity is an intellectual feat, resulting from the abandonment of judgments of what is right or wrong for oneself. In other words, in GUO Xiang’s philosophy of emotion, emotion is a derived state from one’s judgment based on self-interest. Thus, if one can stop making these judgments, one’s affective states would not be so easily aroused. If affectivity stands in the way of one’s embodying nothingness, then emotion is not the culprit; rather, judgment is. Hence, to forget affectivity is not to eradicate natural emotions, but to check one’s aroused emotions derived from self-interested judgments. This state of sagehood is much more obtainable, albeit still an exceptional accomplishment.
In Chapter 16, “Nothingness in Korean Buddhism: The Struggle against Nihilism,” Halla Kim turns our attention to the notion of nothingness in Korean philosophy. Kim focuses on three Korean Buddhist philosophers from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, Wŏnhyo, Chinul and T’aego Pou. As Garfield argues against the nihilistic interpretation of Indian Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy, Kim too argues that the Korean Buddhist notion of nothingness should not be taken to represent nihilism. According to Kim, “nothingness” signifies the absence of self-independence; hence, to say that things are empty means that they have a dependent-arising nature. In other words, our self-nature is empty, but this does not mean that our existence is empty. To embrace the philosophy of nothingness, one does not need to terminate daily activities; however, one does need to recognize the transient and interdependent nature of all things.
In Kim’s exposition, all three Korean philosophers share the belief that intellectual discernment of the true nature of existence is achievable for everyone. What makes enlightenment possible is the inborn luminosity of the mind— our Buddhahood. To attain enlightenment, for Wŏnhyo, one needs to retrieve one’s original true nature through the realization that one is ultimately nothing. “Nothing” in his conception is not to be understood as non-existence; rather, it means being empty of permanent self-dependent nature. His attitude about the phenomenal world is very anti-nihilistic: we should not be preoccupied with the concept of nothingness and forget our worldly responsibilities. Hence, his methodology of contemplating nothingness does not involve inaction or the renunciation of engagement with the world. Enlightenment is achievable simply by seeing that the greatest seed of enlightenment is already inherent in one’s nature. In contrast, Chinul placed his emphasis on individuals’ mental cultivation. In Chinul’s usage, the word ‘mu’ (nothingness) can be used as a weapon that “destroys wrong knowledge and wrong understanding.” Correct knowledge and understanding, on the other hand, is the realization that one’s true nature, one’s Buddhahood, is fundamentally nothing. According to Chinul’s method of self-cultivation, one needs to obtain a psychological state of “thoughtlessness,” which is when the mind stops making discrimination of things and their values. This psychological state is in a sense a form of “void,” through which the agent can obtain a special kind of knowledge that Chinul calls “numinous awareness.” The mental voidness is the positive aspect of his concept of nothingness, since according to him, only in this voidness can the mind achieve the fullness of insights and wisdom. One needs to study sūtras, practice meditation, and gradually develop one’s numinous awareness. The cultivation of this mental state may be gradual and torturous; however, the final awakening could be suddenly available to us—if only we could see that we are all inherently Buddhas to begin with. Finally, for T’aego Pou, the access to Buddhahood is not gained through studying sūtras, but through practice. He abandons Chinul’s teaching of gradual cultivation, and advocates both sudden awakening and immediate cultivation. In his analysis, the word ‘mu’ does not mean non-existence or nothingness; rather, it designates the practitioner’s mental state of emptying thought, such that one no longer has any conscious thought—not even the thought of “not-to-think.” The concept of nothingness thus turns out to be the depiction of an ideal mental state, not a designation of any ultimate reality external to the human mind. In all three philosophers’ conceptions of nothingness, Kim concludes, there is not an inkling of nihilism.
In Chapter 17, “Zen, Philosophy, and Emptiness: Dōgen and the Deconstruction of Concepts,” Gereon Kopf argues that the thirteenth century founder of Sōtō practice in Japan offers the most highly developed “blueprint” for a consistent non-dualistic philosophy. Dōgen achieves this by taking the foregoing philosophical commitments of Madhyamaka śūnyavāda (the doctrine of emptiness) and the sayings and writings of Chan Buddhism to their most “radical” conclusions. Kopf provides an extensive analysis of how the notion of emptiness is treated and developed in a sprawling history of Buddhist texts, from the Prajńaparamitā literature to Nāgārjuna’s treatises, from the Diamond Sūtra to the Platform Sūtra that holds the former in such high esteem, to the works celebrating the dramatic teachings of China’s Tang and Song masters of Chan and the kōan collections that developed from them, and finally to the synthetic treatises of Korea’s Sōn thinkers.
Dōgen, in his seminal work Shōbōgenzō (The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) formulates a “hermeneutics of emptiness” that “deconstructs” a perilous dichotomy that had developed even within the history of Buddhist reflection. On the one hand, we have a line of Buddhist thought that follows the Heart Sūtra’s dictum that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” and is championed by certain Chan Buddhist mottos like Mazu’s “the ordinary mind is Buddha,” which would tend to suggest that emptiness can be found in concrete experiences, expressions, and acts. On the other hand, there is an equally compelling argument made first by the Madhyamaka philosophers, who are thoroughly represented in this volume, that the compulsion to give a genuine description of emptiness will lead us only to paradoxes and eventually silence. Dōgen, Kopf maintains, dissolves this dichotomy through the advocacy of a kind of “linguistic practice” that at once “destabilizes” language, thus halting its natural urge to essentialize through distinctions, and yet enables language to express the real ambiguity in the relationships between things and persons as well as awakening and delusion. Through his exposition of Dōgen’s formulations of “dharma positions,” that is, the stages of belief that Buddhist practitioners pass through on their journeys of realization, and his dialectical playfulness with the oppositions that language presents us with, Kopf makes the case that “ambiguity,” “continuous practice,” and the intersubjectivity of expression and action are hallmarks of a truly non-dualistic philosophy of emptiness.
East Asian philosophical explorations of nothingness are not merely a vestige of ancient or medieval thought—they have been reignited by the profound and provocative works of the twentieth century founders of the Kyoto School of thought. The historical, political, and intellectual circumstances within which the works of the major thinkers of this school were produced ensured that they would engage both Western and traditional Asian philosophical resources in subtle, complex, and incredibly rich ways. The three Kyoto School authors covered in this volume, Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945), Hajime Tanabe (1885–1962) and Kenji Nishitani (1900–1990), bring traditional Buddhist conceptions of emptiness and Daoist conceptions of nothingness to bear on their own insightful readings of Western systems of thought, the fate of contemporary civilization, and the existential challenges of human life. Their works guaranteed that Asian formulations of nothingness would be for us not merely a matter of antiquarian or cross-cultural reflection, but of vital and ongoing philosophical significance in areas as diverse as dialectics, sociopolitical philosophy and existentialism.
In Chapter 18, “Anontology and the Issue of Being and Nothing in Kitarō Nishida,” John W. M. Krummel illustrates how the founder of the Kyoto School, over the course of thirty years, came to articulate the idea of “nothingness” (mu, 無) as a groundless and formless “place” (basho, 場所), within which the manifest “beings” of the world can exist and become differentiated from one another. This conviction, Krummel demonstrates, does not merely derive from what Nishida drew upon in East Asian thought, but also from the works of Western Neo-Kantians such as Lotze and Lask, belying an all-too-simplistic dichotomy that would see “Western” thought as exclusively motivated by the search for “being” and Asian thought by the quest for “nothingness.” In the writings of his early philosophical career, Krummel argues, Nishida’s sense of “nothingness” is thematized in terms of both various considerations of epistemological formality, subject-object duality, as well as reflections on the experiences of fluidity and interiority. Eventually, Nishida comes to the realization that both the “implacement” of things and the positing of self-consciousness lead us to comprehend the “place” of absolute nothingness as well as the processes through which things and individuals in the world positively and reciprocally determine one another. We must not, however, suspect that Nishida, in the articulation of his mature thought, was merely creating another ontology that replaced “being” as the ground of existence with “nothingness.” Instead, Krummel claims, Nishida, through his simultaneous focus on the groundlessness of nothingness and his attempts to understand how that very nothingness serves as the place of the world’s process, offers us not ontology, but an “anontology.”
In the following chapter (Chapter 19), “Tanabe’s Dialectic of Species as Absolute Nothingness,” Makoto Ozaki highlights how Tanabe, Nishida’s successor as the chair of the Philosophy Department at Kyoto Imperial University, attempts to remove the notion of nothingness from the rarified theoretical heights of Nishida’s system and place it within our historical lives. In his “triadic logic of species” that deals with universality, particularity, and individuality, Tanabe understands nothingness to be “eternity.” However, this “eternity” is not a static being, but rather the ongoing “negation” of the past by the present and then the present by the future. Moreover, this ongoing “negation” is primarily experienced by the self, in the forms of uncertainty, finitude, and repetition or renewal. The political state, on the other hand, also plays a crucial role in the historical unfolding of nothingness insofar as it, on the one hand, “negates” the individual and groups her into a mere genus and, on the other, attempts to unite the individuals within itself as well as all other states. Both the individual and the state can, in attempting to preserve an illusory aspiration for their own unmediated existences in the face of their differential resistances to mediating negativity, turn to evil, and even “radical evil.” They are both, therefore, ever in need of repentance and conversion, which itself is a manifestation of the work of nothingness in human practices. Ozaki’s essay argues emphatically that Tanabe’s philosophy of nothingness is indispensable for us today. Tanabe’s philosophy situates nothingness within the historical world of religion, politics, and individual practice, and acknowledges that radical evil is a necessary condition of existence in that very world. It envisioned a dialogue between Buddhist, Christian, and Marxist thought that would foreground nothingness, repentance, and sociopolitical reform all at once, a “syncretic” dialogue that places religion in a finally appropriate role of helping to achieve “the salvation of humanity.”
Finally, in Chapter 20, Yasuo Deguchi turns our attention toward the existential significance of the experience of nothingness in his essay, “Nishitani on Emptiness and Nothingness.” In a careful analysis of the early and late works of Kenji Nishitani, Deguchi uncovers how a personal “reconciliation” with nihilism can be made possible through the experience of emptiness. In his early thought, Deguchi argues, Nishitani constructed merely intellectual grounds for justifying the superiority of traditional Mahāyāna Buddhist conceptions of emptiness over both foregoing Theravāda and Western existentialist ideals, as well as Western philosophical lionizations of subjectively constituted reason. This superiority was seen by Nishitani as lying in the resistance of Mahāyāna Buddhists to either objectify the self and its immutability or objectify nihility and make of the self a center of defiantly triumphant will. Insofar as this is the case, Mahāyāna enables us to “overcome” the nihilism in which modern existentialism has dead-ended us. In this early work, Deguchi maintains, Nishitani makes no substantive distinction between the Buddhist notions of “nothingness” and “emptiness.” However, in his later reflections, Nishitani is compelled by the realization that nihilism, though it cannot be completely overcome, may be amenable to our acceptance, in our “reconciliation.” This acceptance, however, requires that our emotions and will be “captured” by an experience that enables us to embrace nihility. Such an “emotive-volitional” reconciliation can only be achieved by a special sort of image experience. It is here where the decisive distinction between the traditional Buddhist ideas of “nothingness” and “emptiness” appears, since, as Nishitani argues, while there is no archetypal image of nothingness available to us, emptiness does present itself to us in the image of the sky. In classical Chinese, the term for “emptiness” (kong, 空) also meant “sky.” Since we can be immersed in aesthetic rapture at the sky’s infinity in everyday experiences as well as be drawn to it by art forms such as traditional circle calligraphy and paintings, we can effectively, like the sky itself, envelop the infinite expanse of nihility within us. In Nishitani’s mature thought then, Deguchi argues, East Asian Buddhist expressions of nothingness and emptiness—aesthetic ones and not merely those of the doctrinal variety— can come to our own aid in living as finite creatures in the world.
JeeLoo Liu
Douglas L. Berger
1 We wish to thank Graham Priest for help with this paragraph.