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10 Buddha and God: Nishida’s Contributions to a New Apocalyptic Theology Thomas J. J. Altizer Nishida Kitarō is the most distinguished and influential philosopher in the history of modern Japan, and as a founding member of the Kyoto School he has had a great impact upon religious thinking throughout the world. Throughout most of his philosophical career, Nishida was shaped primarily by his response to German philosophy from Leibniz through Husserl. He only centered upon Buddhist philosophy in his final years, yet it is his final thinking that has had the greatest impact. His last essay, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview” (1945), is the most comprehensive formulation of his philosophy, and it has become known as a pivotal, fundamental text of the Kyoto School. This is above all true in its centering upon an absolute nothingness, giving us our most modern understanding of śūnyatā, and yet this nothingness is here called forth as the primal center and ground of both thinking and of human existence itself. Nowhere in the West has such an absolute nothingness been so comprehensively understood, but Nishida unveils it as the center of both Eastern and Western thinking, although he believed that it is only in the Japanese spirit that there occurred an integral realization of the identity of absolute nothingness with actuality itself, as most openly realized in Zen Buddhism and a uniquely Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. Speaking as a Christian theologian whose work is grounded in an absolute nothingness, I acknowledge that Nishida and the Kyoto School have been a fundamental ground of my work, but this has entailed an enormous struggle to realize a uniquely Christian absolute nothingness, and uniquely Christian if only because of its apocalyptic actuality. While Nishida and the Kyoto School have been most challenging to me in their correlation of Bud- 180   | Thomas J. J. Altizer dha and God, and of a uniquely Buddhist Buddha and a uniquely Christian Christ, this occurs through a deeply kenotic or self-emptying thinking—one which has no parallel in the history of Christian theology, although it is the center of a uniquely Hegelian thinking. This is the thinking which has been my primary philosophical ground, so that pale as my thinking is in the perspective of Nishida and the Kyoto School, I think that it is nevertheless the fullest Christian counterpart to their thinking, and certainly one which has been deeply affected by their work. I shall always be grateful for the rich dialogues that I had with Nishitani and Abe Masao, who seemed to be able to enter my thinking spontaneously, and who ever prodded me to prosecute it more radically—a radicalness surely realized in the Kyoto School, and embodied there as it nowhere is in any body of Christian theologians. Not insignificantly , Buddhist thinking is deeply grounded in meditation, or in what the West understands as contemplation as opposed to meditation; and just as a deeper mystical thinking in both East and West has called forth an absolute nothingness, this is a critical point at which Eastern and Western thinking coincide . Buddhist scholars have initiated the West into the fundamental role of an absolute nothingness in Eastern art, but so too we are now coming to understand a parallel role of an absolute nothingness in modern or late-modern Western art, literature, and music, even if at this point Western philosophical and theological understanding lag behind Western art. Absolute nothingness or an absolute Nihil has only very peripherally entered into Western philosophical thinking. Although this is fundamental in crucial sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic, as in Heidegger’s Being and Time and Beiträge, neither Heidegger nor Hegel fully explored an absolute nothingness. Among our theologians, only Barth and Tillich have openly confronted the Nihil, and even if this is crucial to their deeper thinking, it only gave way to strictly limited confrontations with absolute nothingness in their theologies. Perhaps at no other point are we in deeper need today of a truly new theology; and if we are now being overwhelmed by the dominance of orthodox theologies, it could well be that they would best be challenged by a new theological thinking of absolute nothingness—and thus, the Kyoto School might be more contemporary now than ever before. Indeed, we are keenly aware of the power of nihilism in our world, a nihilism that is more universal now than it has ever previously been. But nihilism cannot be understood...

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