Reading Nishida through Shinran: Absolute Nothingness, Other Power, and Religious Consciousness

While buddhist logic and worldviews undoubtedly inform much of Nishida Kitarō’s writing, his last work “The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview” directly deals with the importance of Zen and Pure Land Buddhist themes in his overall philosophical project.¹ This paper will focus on Nishida’s references to Shinran in this work. While Nishida is more often associated with Zen Buddhism, focusing on Shinran’s influence will broaden the reader of Nishida’s understanding of the relation between morality and religion; absolute nothingness; and expression and the historical world.

One of the most complex aspects of Nishida’s thought involves his views on morality, especially in light of his concepts of inverse correlation and absolutely contradictory self-identity, notions that tend to either cancel or invert conventional morality. Nishida’s references to Shinran help us make sense of his view of morality and religion. He sets his view of religion apart from conceptions of religion that base the possibility of self-transformation on one’s diligent efforts to follow a code of behavior; instead, religion is about a “reversal of values.”² Nishida makes two consistent claims throughout his writings that get to the heart of his view of religious consciousness: (1) Religious awareness requires a complete “turnaround” of the self, and (2) There is something in the “depths of the self that transcends the self and yet gives it its existence.”³ Shinran’s conception of religious transformation and its basis in the formless dharmakāya of emptiness can assist in clarifying Nishida’s view of the relation between the human being and absolute nothingness without lapsing into a view of religious practice that stems from self-reliance, or one’s own efforts to be a good practitioner. Shinran insists that religious insight rests upon our discovery that our own efforts are futile; we cannot transcend the foolishness that is inherent in human nature. Traditional notions of religious practice where those who engage in right conduct are more fit to gain religious insight simply do not hold. This is because, for Shinran, the outer appearance of doing good is often undermined by a hidden egocentrism, or what he calls “self power” (J. jiriki). Ultimately, whether one is good or evil, accomplished or mediocre, young or old, makes no difference because all human beings are foolishly ego-centered and utterly incapable of bringing about the turnaround to non-ego, or Other power, through their own efforts.

While readers of Nishida are familiar with the concept of absolutely contradictory self-identity (J. zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu), Nishida’s allusions to Shinran’s idea of inverse correlation shed new light on this notion. Nishida writes that the self is truly itself only through its own self-negation; it has its being in that which transcends it. The self is identical with itself through expression; it is the “self-expressing point of the world.”⁴ Shinran provides us with a concrete example. Caught in a time where meditative and other self-directed practices were the dominant ideologies for elite practice, Shinran recognized that there was a great discrepancy between the ideals of buddhist practice and the reality of the inevitable foolishness of all human beings, even buddhist practitioners.⁵ However, instead of taking this as cause for despair, Shinran avows that when one truly apprehends the depths of one’s blind passions and the subsequent impossibility of right practice, one simultaneously realizes Amida Buddha’s profound compassion. For Nishida, in turn, the aspect of self-negation in religious consciousness is the negation of the conscious self that believes in its own powers. The important point here is that religious consciousness does not emerge from the self; it comes about through the call of the absolute other, that is, other to self-consciousness.⁶ If one could become religiously aware through one’s own efforts, then Nishida’s assertion that absolute nothingness transcends the self would be meaningless.

While drawing out Shin Buddhist themes in Nishida’s work illuminates his views on the aforementioned key ideas, it is important to note that...