https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=H4uN-y_8-BE
Welcome to Voices with Raveki. Today I’m very excited because we’re going to get into a topic that I’ve alluded to many times in both my video series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and other discussions I’ve had and that’s going to be around the Kyoto School in particular Nishitani and his book Religion and Nothingness and I’m going to this to do this was proposed to me by Jared Morningstar so welcome Jared why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi John thanks for having me really excited to dig into some interesting East Asian philosophy with you. Right. So I’m Jared I have a background in religious studies formally and since that education I’ve been trying to continue my studies and keep building community around some of these sorts of topics so just a few months back I finished an online book club on Keiji Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness and it was really an impactful read for both myself and the other participants there. This wasn’t my first time with this text. It was the first time that I read it in full cover to cover but I’d read large portions of it previously in some upper level Buddhist studies classes so I had some preparation coming in and I think that was really good but it’s certainly one of those texts where without knowing a decent bit about Buddhism in general and in particular Mahayana tradition and then also Western philosophy Christian theology you might be really kind of having a hard time swimming through it so I’m looking forward to being able to sort of dig some of these major themes and ideas out in conversation here so that they’re hopefully a bit more accessible. That’s great that’s well put yeah I similarly have read with others Religion and Nothingness twice. It’s as I said before I’d put it in terms of the top five books I’ve read in my life it’s up there with you know Plato’s Republic and Platinus’ Aeneids or something like that that’s how and somebody who’s aware of Religion and Nothingness as you are would probably see just how prevalent it is throughout the entire of awakening from the meaning crisis. Nishitani’s had just a profound and deep influence and continues to on my thinking. As I was preparing I was going over some stuff and I was realizing a lot of these stuff that I come up with these ideas then I go back and I realize oh yes I ultimately got these it was inspired by Nishitani so I feel at some point although I do you know give him credit and praise I need to cite him more because of the profound influence he had on me. So for those of you who don’t know the Kyoto School is a Japanese school of philosophy well it’s philosophy in the ancient sense of philosophy it’s not just conceptual analysis it’s about philosophy as a way of life that is conducive to wisdom, enlightenment, self-transcendence, etc. So it’s one of those things like Buddhism itself at least certain guises of Buddhism that straddles the boundaries between what we normally separate as philosophy and religion and the Kyoto School attempted itself to be a deep bridging between Buddhist philosophy especially Zen although Pure Land Buddhism has some influences too but especially Zen and continental philosophy especially the work of Nishitani of Heidegger. William James is also deeply influential on Nishita so James and Heidegger are deeply influential later people like Maso Abe are also familiar with Whitehead and Tillich and so there’s an attempt to get beyond through synoptic integration the limitations of both eastern and western philosophy if you’ll allow me to use those adjectives so this is of course very pertinent for us today very very pertinent but what’s especially pertinent about Nishitani is that he focuses on the problem of nihilism as the central problem that he wants to address by bridging eastern and western philosophy together so of course Heidegger and Nietzsche loom large from the western tradition but various aspects about the Nishitani but various aspects about emptiness and no no thingness which will of course Jared and I will get into from the Zen tradition are also figuring very largely in his work. Just before we get into it I would not if you have not read any of this for the background picking up and reading religion and nothingness is very very hard as Jared indicated Nishitani presupposes a very literate reader somebody who’s very familiar with a few things one is sort of Heideggerian Nietzsche and Heideggerian continental philosophy to some degree the neoplatonic tradition this figures in Nishitani’s work quite a bit and you’ll see it also in commentators on um Nishitani making that connection Suzuki DT Suzuki was sort of a figurehead of the Kyoto school often made comparisons between Zen and Eckhart Meister Eckhart a neoplatonic Christian so you need to understand that and then of course you need to have some deep and it can’t be just conceptual you need to have a participatory experience you need to have practiced and lived within some of the ecologies and practices of Buddhism and to some degree Daoism and then only then are you really really in the place where you can read this terrifically profound book but I would recommend a couple of books for people as good introductions Robert Carter is an excellent guide to the Kyoto school and this book the Kyoto school introduction by Robert E. Carter who actually taught at Trent University here in Canada yay Canada this is an excellent book his book on Nishida the nothingness beyond god is also excellent and then as a second introduction I recommend this book by Joan Stramba the formless the formless self is also a very good introduction and then there’s also a couple of anthologies there’s called the Buddha eye which is an anthology of essays I should have brought that here I’ll get it this is an anthology of essays by people in the Kyoto school and so I would recommend getting some background of familiarity in those streams that I mentioned maybe reading the Carter book the strong book then perhaps try the essays from the Buddha I and then then I think you’ll be in a place where you could tackle our religion and nothingness and not only that but also the religion and nothingness I’m not trying to build a mystique around it I it’s exactly the opposite I think I am yet deeply serious when I think this is one of the most important books I’ve read in my entire life many people regard it rightly as a world historically important philosophical text and again not philosophy in the just conceptual sense but in the life transformative sense so I want to prepare you as much as possible for a deep engagement so you can really drink the depths of this book and is really profoundly relevant to what I’ve been calling the meaning crisis so that’s a little bit of a setup just so people can get a background and if this is very foreign to them as it is liable to be this should give them here’s you here’s the educational pathway to get into what we’re talking about hopefully this our discussion will serve as a good introduction as well so Jared I’ve been talking a lot I want to turn things over to you for a bit how would you like to start in on this and start to tackle it unfold it yeah just quick I also have a secondary source recommendation here very recently republished just at the end of 2019 it’s a anthology of scholars responding very directly to his religion and nothingness came out I think towards the the end of the 80s there so the the English version of the book was was translated 83 I believe and it’s a really unique translation in that Jan van Brakt worked directly with Nishitani to to create the translation and there’s even passages in the English version that they sort of wrote fresh that don’t really appear in the in the Japanese original so we’re really getting something authentic and unique in that translation but but this anthology I’d say would be a an excellent sort of post reader after you’ve you’ve gone through the text and experienced it being able to go through these essays which really deal with sort of each each of the the different major themes that Nishitani hits on and and help to to to clarify some things in there so I I just about finished this one and it’s definitely helped me dig even deeper so we definitely definitely recommend that’s excellent so and you say that’s a good thing to sort of read after yeah black or religion and nothingness to give you a sort of a reflective reappraisal of it mm-hmm okay that’s excellent I have not seen that anthology so I’m going to order it once we are done wonderful yeah it just popped out at the the end of 2019 and I just happened to get it in my amazon recommendations or something so very very synchronous there great great anyway um where to begin um with Nishitani I think maybe just a broad overview of some of these themes might be helpful especially the the major concepts that that your viewers will be new to Shunyatta and his his unique approach to nihility perhaps first yeah yeah I think that would be I mean that’s going to be the place where most people are going to find a sort of immediate access coming in out of you know I mean as I said in my series I wanted to include him as one of the prophets of the meaning crisis but I decided I’m going to hold off on that because I want him to be a star figure in another series I’m working on which is a series on non-theism and the reinvention of the statehood in terms of this struggle with the meaning crisis and so but yeah I see him I think the problem of nihilism the problem of the meaning crisis and he definitely gets it very profoundly is a good place to start so why don’t we start there yeah um so this idea of nihility factors in really pretty immediately in in his work here and is a pretty consistent thread all the way throughout and so basically this isn’t just a an idea of like a psychological state of nihilism but it’s it’s really an ontological reality here that he’s trying to describe though it also does include this this psychological component that we’re more familiar with but I think basically a good way to to start to approach this is to consider it in terms of concepts like finitude or death things that really sort of have this immediate sense of sort of the ground dropping out beneath the meanings that were we’re used to to swimming in within life and so this is sort of something Nishitani’s laying the groundwork for for them to to get some somewhere else which is this standpoint of of shunyata but in terms of the the nihility it’s this like really profound ontological reality that sort of is the the reversal of our sense of meanings our the sense of realness of of things and and suchness and being of them that we especially in our our western philosophical mind sort of very being focused take as as this very fundamental way that reality is is constituted. That’s great let’s try and unpack that a little bit more than for people so there’s a sense in which I mean sort of death infinitude these are perennial aspects of human being and they can cause people to fall into despair and Nishitani of course means that and he doesn’t mean despair just psychologically he means it like Kierkegaard means it he means this I tried to get at this I’m not saying it’s adequate but this was my stab at this was to talk about sort of the breakdown of our cultural cognitive grammar not only the individual project but the shared projects by which we try to you know lay the grammar for how we’re going to make sense and make action and make persons right and all that all of that fundamental cultural cognitive grammar now it can come into question individually for us when we confront of the sort of crucial features of absurdity as a perennial and Nishitani of course is talking about that but he’s also I mean it’s also very clear he’s talking about a historical process that has come to a particular point of fruition especially within you know Western society European society and the figure of Nietzsche therefore looms very largely so there’s this idea that you Nishitani is both pointing towards individual despair but he’s also pointing towards the death of God right and so he’s talking about the two of them together when he’s talking about the problem of nihilism at least to my mind he’s trying to always remind us he’s always talking to which is part of the beauty of his writing is he’s often addressing you as an individual but he’s also addressing the culture the world culture as a whole at the same time yeah it’s an incredibly like multivalent idea this this nihility he’s bringing into play here and the way he sort of roots it’s the inevitability of it foiling up within our current classical Western European philosophical frameworks is really really phenomenal like going back to Aristotle and the idea of substance as sort of like the first step in Western philosophy where being a very being focused philosophical system was really cemented in and so this isn’t a very low resolution kind of romanticism for tradition he’s really plumbing the depths back to some of the very roots of Western philosophical thinking and getting at things things from there so yeah figures like Aristotle, Kant is another big one who he sort of tackles and sees as sort of furthering the acceleration of some of the landscape where nihility can be especially like easy to to uprise there and I really noticed that in your own series as well with some of these same same figures but yeah so Aristotle you get this very substance oriented philosophical vision which sort of ignores the non-being side for a more exclusive look of being so realness is constituted by things being solely by substance and then in Kant you have then this sort of divide much more between the self and the world and so then you have this subject which is also a point which can be considered as this like fundamentally real this like fundamentally real thing within Western philosophical tradition and Nishitani’s ideas of nihility function on both of those both sides of that divide where the nihility can boil up at the bottom of things with substance and it can also boil up at the bottom of the the subject with the with a self so that’s good let’s try and talk about that that’s really good I like the way you just put that the boiling up at the bottom so part of how what I understood Nishitani was saying is we get a notion of of reality as being and then we understand being and this comes to fruition in Kant as a kind of autonomy a kind of self-imposedness right and of course this comes to this comes to us in the Cartesian ego in which the right the the Cartesian self is completely self-enclosed and we have subjectivity that is completely autonomous completely self-enclosed and then you get the sickness unto death of Kierkegaard because you have to think of that subjectivity as an ever tightening noose right that you lose right you’re progressively moving towards you know that that point and I’m going to make a bridge with this here you know at which doubt is supposed to stop when you get to sort of the the center of the self the center of subjectivity so the self-encloseness where it gets to this point where it can go no further and then that’s what’s most real and that has permeated our culture in that everything and this is one of Heidegger’s critique everything is is subjectively centered right everything is centered on human subjectivity and serves it and so the problem I see Nishatani saying is when we have that view of being where we where we where we transform hypostasis into substance into right into is self-enclosed right rather than that which stands under but instead that which that which stands under precisely because it is enclosed upon itself right and you can see how this comes to fruition right in Nishis will to power that everything is so enclosed and upon itself and all it’s doing is just expanding itself right it there’s right so there is no relatedness to anything else so the idea is because we’re like that and we see this in Descartes when right when we encounter the existential doubt when we encounter an absurdity the grammar of our culture drives us inward to this point right and then it tells us to stop there and then we are we are bereft we are absolutely cut off by that existential doubt we are absolutely isolated not only from the world and other people but from ourself because anything outside right of our pure present subjective experience is subject to doubt subject to absurdity right and then Nishatani’s point is that when we might call it psychological existential doubt hits the that the way that grammar drives us we are then stuck we are deeply stuck and that’s what he sees our problem of nihilism is that we get to a place where the doubt is stuck and where the nihilism is stuck and we we’re just we’re just trapped and at a loss and and so I think the central thing to to turn to now and this was a title of one of his earlier books is the self-overcoming of nihilism that Nishatani’s great insight was you can only under you can only overcome nihilism by taking it through to its depths but our fixation on the the self-sustaining self-enclosedness the pure actuality of being right and which means it has no receptivity no relationality that cultural cognitive grammar and it and its inherent atomic subjectivity means that we can’t actually take nihilism deep enough so that we can overcome it and this I think is one of his profoundest insights all of our attempts to try and assert this fundamental grammar in the face of nihilism they all collapse because everything we try to do just circles goes through the same process and we circle back in and then we’re trapped here again and we’re completely cut off we’re completely isolated and nothing matters to us and nothing means anything to us and so I was trying to get at that with in the series you can see the influence I was trying to get at you know how we get trapped in this process that slowly strangles us and we keep we keep running the grammar faster and faster only to find that it the noose gets tighter and tighter around us Mm-hmm yeah I think his his critique of Descartes here is particularly yes relevant and how he he sees what Descartes project ultimately did is is place like confine us to this field of the cogito or the field of cognition and so everything that we are apprehending is is very much in this self-enclosed and related back to the self and so ultimately when we encounter this nihility we we parse it through through our our self and when you have this dynamic of of nihility and the self it it it really just keeps you stuck there in in that nihilism because naturally I mean in our self-centered ways we we really resist this this nihility that’s coming up because we see it really eroding the the meanings and even the very beings of of the things that are that are most important in our lives but ultimately what what Nishitani wants to do is is achieve this radicalization of of nihility that he calls the the conversion to the shunyata or emptiness or the great doubt there’s the yeah through the great doubt there and so it no longer is is the ontological reality of of nihility which is like a very like part of the fabric of reality as much as as beingness is and so he he sort of traverses through that not on the the field of of of cognition but on through this much more existential mode where it’s not always relating back to the self and things are able to be encountered on their their own home ground and so when when this process is is achieved here this aspect of nihility is is sort of blown up it’s opened up it empties itself through its own bottom there and so on this new field of emptiness it’s you have like paradoxical the two sides of things like co-arising and co-supporting together and so it’s really this aspect of nihility that like ultimately like constitutes the thing’s real being and its realness and its autonomy so let’s let that excellent excellent this is really fun let’s again try and unpack that step by step yeah yeah part of what i see is that the way and remember we inhabit this worldview and it it’s it’s it’s it goes into the very way in which we inhabit our own bodies and mind right um it’s deep havatas right and so everything’s coming into question but we’ve been tutored by Descartes coming out of a long history and reinforced by Kant that the one thing that doesn’t come into question is the self right um so the the self is regarded as substantial um the subject of all the predicates right um and so what doesn’t come into question is the self and then Nishitani’s point is insofar as you do not let the the questioning the nihility come into the self the self is always deeply other to reality it’s there’s complete lack of conformity complete lack of contact so this this attempt to preserve the substantial self at all costs licensed by Descartes and Kant that of course means that the process right it will the process of meaninglessness or the expansion of absurdity is not allowed into the self itself um and and and for Nishitani that’s that’s the great that’s the great mistake and that’s the great and instead what we do and this is i think where his critique of Nietzsche comes in is everything goes down to here and then our response is ah then the self should push out even harder right it should will to power and well i make the meaning and i am who i am and right and and and and right and so that’s that’s our response and we and we and our culture sort of really valorizes that right and then Nishitani says no that’s that’s a mistake the mistake is right is and you’re you’re exactly right Jared this is not just and this is not a merely intellectual or even cognitive process this is an existential this is a modal process you have to let that and this is where the connection to Socrates is so profound um Sramba in her book actually directly makes this connection she says that meaninglessness can be our basically our Socrates if we if we if we if we are willing to to let it if we were willing to really confront it and let us right and and of course in many of the dialogues what happens is people they they they close off in the confrontation with Socrates right but those who really absorb the aporia right they actually right they they allow the self to come into question and then what Nishitani says is you discover right you discover something you discover the no thingness of the self and we can talk more about that in a minute but here’s here’s the here’s even before you get to that he says there’s a moment and you can see glimmers of this in Camus right where there is there’s the beginning of a recovery of the contact with reality because the absurdity is now right indwelling the self as opposed to just being resisted by this self right and so there’s a deep there’s now an opening up there’s a breaking of the the imprisonment in egocentrism because there’s a level at and this is going to be one of his big themes where you know something by becoming it you know you don’t know it by representing it or willing it or expressing it you know it by becoming it and so you go from knowing the absurdity as an object remember what object means right thrown against resist right you and you don’t just know it subjectively as your feelings about the object you actually become it i would say transjectively and so you become the absurdity and then the idea is that breaks you out of that egocentrism and it gives you the first sense of that right that absurdity can only have done that precisely because there’s a way in which you and reality right are you know it by becoming it so this is where i got this from nishatani plays on the word realization all the time so good yeah he plays on the word realization all the time right it’s so that realization that i just talked about that realization of absurdity is both the act of me understanding and the act of it becoming actualized in me right not a representation but you know part of my being i know it in my being what i call the participatory knowing and like i said you can see that even in camu at the end of the stranger right where he’s talking about all about absurdity and everything but he has all he has like that mystical experience where he wants everybody to hate him and because he right and you can see that the there he gets a sense of the absurdity within and the absurdity without are starting to resonate so even in camu you i think you at you start to get a sense of that that’s controversial but i i think that’s uh that’s that’s one of my takes so i take that to be there’s two things that are happening in that moment we are we are discovering first of all the the the what because we’re the great doubt reveals that the autonomy and self-enclosedness of of our subjectivity of our self-consciousness of all that stuff right is not metaphysically necessary right it it it it there there because it presents itself as the only game in town that right right and there is no it’s not and it and that is that is that is coupled to is bound up with this rediscovery of the depths of participatory knowing that we know things by becoming them rather than them resisting us are we willing them or us just representing them representing them within our subjectivity there’s this deeper kind and this is the influence of both heidegger and buddhism on him there’s this deeper kind of knowing the deep kind of participatory knowing suddenly is realized by us and so the great doubt i think is like this like this pivotal move yeah so i i i just i was trying to unpack what you would what you said about it how it’s much deeper and it’s more than just a psychological thing and how it’s right because i’m trying to and i’m not telling you what to say you say what you want to say but i’m trying to translate a lot of nishatani’s terms like home ground and things yeah into something that might be more directly accessible to the people who are watching right here yeah he certainly has a handful of coinages and then also these like classical buddhist terms that yeah do do need some uh some increased accessibility for for a lot of people i’d say um yeah in terms of of uh this sort of uh dynamic of shunyata we’re getting into um it’s it’s so it’s so fascinating and it’s and it’s so hard to to grasp by the very nature of it um because he he i mean is very explicit that this can’t be a a representational reality right when we we make shunyata into a thing like emptiness by its its nature is no thing yeah um and so we’re already off on on the wrong foot there so uh trying to like grapple with this concept and even apply it is is very very tedious and and difficult and and really has almost a poetic element in it i feel oh i i think it’s that i i mean this is why i brought up this notion of realization and yeah in the transjective sense because shunyata is is never a representation it’s never a thing it’s always it’s always i don’t want to say it’s something see the language is ah right but so it’s always within realization right it’s right there it’s not it’s not it’s not something realized right um and it’s not it’s yeah um it’s the it is the the very sinews of the real of transjective realization see the the thing that he he he wants us to realize is that well maybe i mean and he uh not so much him but abe makes a lot of connections to tillich right and the idea that the self is ultimately mysterious and reality is ultimately mysterious in a deep way um and it’s only by accepting that the loss of the self and closeness of the self within that we can then let we can actually realize the mystery the depths of reality um and and so it’s important that shunyata i mean this is difficult the adjective i want to use but i want to i want to give his definition first he defines religion as really self-realizing reality right and he’s right so it’s where it’s where whereas what is absolutely foregrounded um is the transjective realization that we were just talking about a few minutes ago and how it’s opening things up in their depths and it’s opening them up beyond any way in which there’s they we have a fixed closed representation or grasp on them right and so that’s what he means by religion so the the event of shunyata is religious it’s religious right you it’s so for him there is no way of coming into a relationship with shunyata that does not carry with it deep mutual transformation of one’s self in the world yeah yeah i to try and put it succinctly with some of these these main terms he’s using we start at being and we encounter nihility which is ultimately just this like aspect of reality as much as being is but because we’re caught up in this self-enclosed cognitive grammar we resist this this aspect rather than integrating it into ourselves and our world experience and when we can integrate that we have both the nihility and the being in in mutually self arising for each other so ultimately being is constituting the nihility and the nihility is constituting being and this is really what this field of of shunyata is it’s this what it’s the field beneath both those fields that makes them able to be real for themselves through the other and that that analysis then it extends on the field of shunyata for for any any particular the the fire that that burns burns because it does not burn itself yeah and and and any self that you have grasped is not is not the self right and and anything so this is what yeah so let’s let’s dig into that a little bit because there’s a sense in which right everything has a double aspect right everything everything is what it’s he’s he’s picking up on the zen idea uh well actually goes back to nargajuna right the form is emptiness emptiness is form uh and and that the two are inseparable uh inseparable from each other um and this is often talked about as a kind of non-duality so let’s do the you know the fire it’s only the combustion only exists because of the elements within it that don’t combust yeah or the eye only sees precisely because it’s not looking at itself if it was looking at itself um it couldn’t see so and this this is uh this is also from the taotei chen right it’s the emptiness in the cup that we actually are making themselves but of course the emptiness wouldn’t work if the cup wasn’t also so let’s do but this thing about the eye because he uses that one quite a bit those from the western religious traditions might like the the fire better because it’s like the burning bush um in the bible the fire that burns it has never burned up right um but the thing about the eyes it’s it’s usually a little bit more apparent to people and i can punt out a little bit um yeah it’s precisely that right it’s the eye the one thing the eye cannot see is itself and only in not seeing itself is it capable of seeing other things so the the the substance of the eye itself its ability to see is actually born from the fact that it’s not self-enclosed that it is not autonomous that it is not bound or in fully it is not fully subject to itself all right that if it was fully subject to itself caught in its subjectivity it would of course never ever see um so there there is always um there is always the that which is not the eye at least as we understand the eye is that which sees uh that actually makes it be the eye and so everything has for nishatani this sort of double aspect it has both um you know what it is that’s its form but it’s inherently bound up uh he called right with uh what it’s not and that the way it’s what it’s not is how it’s open to everything else other than itself and his point is those two are absolutely inseparable and from as you said from aristotle along we we we we took the one and we tried to exclude it from the other we we made that its form and the way it encloses itself is completely separate from how it’s open to other things and nishatani is saying no no everything is actually like that and for me what i sort of got from nishatani is that realization in nishatani sense of the realization of the double aspectedness of everything is precisely what allows that fundamental that fundamental aspect shift where we go from no thingness as privation to no thingness as the shining of everything the disclosure of everything yeah and and the other aspect uh that’s not so focused on the one particular thing but more the like thing in the da sign uh is that uh the being uh the home ground of the particular object is is constituted by the the existence and reality of all other things and vice versa the particular thing is is the he uses this language of master and servant so all other things are the servant of one particular thing and its home ground and it is the master of other things and uh likewise vice versa yeah um and so uh oh no no but that’s yeah i mean that that’s that’s that you know that that’s the classic that’s indra’s net right that comes out and so yeah the idea there is right yeah the circuminsensuality of everything um so so the language i’ve been trying to use to get this is the thing you on itself there’s a moreness to everything and that moreness right is part of it is it’s combinatorially explosive relationships and with everything else right but but there but that moreness is also um and nishatani does use this word a lot um when you talked about how how you know um that what something is is arises in terms of how it’s open to everything else but that doesn’t become an amorphous homogenous blob uh right it’s not just sort of right right it’s a thing so the the moreness also comes into the suchness the way so think about um think about like uh and this when things are beautiful right so when this is beautiful when this when this strikes you as beautiful right there’s simultaneously there’s a moreness to it i never knew cups could be like this i never knew things were like this right and your whole world is now seen in a new light but in this but in the but in the same token and this goes this calling would emphasize this this is there’s a sense about which this is now non-categorical for me there’s the suchness of this here nowness that isn’t captured by the category of mug so there’s simultaneously there’s so much more and at the same time and it you know my whole world is is is lighted in a new way but it’s also there’s the suchness of this this this is it’s i don’t want to use the word uniqueness because that uh that goes back to the self-encloseness but it’s those two things and i mean and that’s a constant theme through nishitani that sort of stereoscopic vision like you know right that where you’re you’re always trying to look uh you know try to look through subjectivity and objectivity to what’s beyond them look beyond the moreness and the suchness to what can only be realized through them right look beyond uh um you know the the the the the no thingness and being to what can be seen through them and of course it can’t be spoken in either one of those languages or grammar because it’s only seen between them and so he i think this is the religious aspect when we get that stereoscopic seeing when we can see through both aspects in this deeply ontological way we come into the deepest conformity with things we get into the deepest contact with reality and that is the answer to nihilism the answer to nihilism is that deep that deep that profound realization that deep contact with uh with shunyata it’s not even contact identification but again not sort of disappearance not like a drop in an ocean right yeah one thing that is is truly phenomenal about uh his work here is just how he i mean he is a very non-dual like oneness kind of oriented thinker but uh the like fundamental respect for particulars that is included within this uh this whole thought system he he presents is is is just truly remarkable um yeah as you’re reading him you just really like as he’s talking about a particular like you you feel the the oneness and that you really are he really brings you into that that profound contact there with the the oneness through the particular and the particular through the oneness yes well said just this yeah and just this like i i don’t know it’s it’s it is a religious experience to to really like really read that and on a deep level and uh like get that through through the text um one way that uh that i was able to come up with uh using a metaphor to sort of explain this master servant relationship he’s talking about is uh sort of through an analysis of uh of something like artistic photography or painting so imagine scene one uh you have a a picture of a murderer with a knife stabbing a victim the knife in this uh picture is like such a subject element and it is like supported by all these surrounding elements in this in this photograph where the the all these different figures the steam like dark alley at night perhaps like so constitutes the specific being of of this knife uh now picture two uh you have a chef working in a kitchen and a knife like against the the wall with other utensils and the knife in this situation is is the the servant uh to other aspects that are the master that’s a good way of dramatizing it yeah yeah so i i think being able to to see because i think we pretty intuitively experience that uh in in artwork there how the background constitutes the foreground and vice versa and they can and they can and they can invert and right right yeah yeah and so his basic idea here is that uh everything is always both the the knife in scene one and the knife in scene two everything is both uh he says that you know the the middle right everything is the center of everything else um which he also talks about uh nicolas of kusa who you know defined god as the what the intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere um and cuz kusa was also trying to in learned ignorance he was trying to what he’ll do is he takes he’ll takes opposites and then he pushes them until the opposition collapses and something beyond it yeah is disclosed but when you were talking about the the oneness in the more in the particular um and the particular in the oneness i mean for me i mean two things were immediately triggered one and masu abi picks up on this is his white head you know white head talks about how the whole of the universe uh collapses into one thing and then is added like it’s it’s it’s not a static collapse everything comes into this and this adds something novel it’s suchness is the novelty of the collapse of everything and then that novelty gets taken up in everything else is novelization if you’ll allow me a neologism and so it made me think it made me think of uh of that uh right away and then like i said it made me think also of oh i can’t remember the the the chinese patriarch’s name the indras net right um the idea that each jewel is the reflection of all the other jewels right and so yeah nishitani it’s interesting now if you if you switch to the aesthetics of his text his writing is actually to trying to get you into that state of mind that state of like when your state of mind is kind of like indra net like like indras net you’ve got this sort of dynamic holographic state of mind and it’s only when you sort of realize that state of mind does what he’s like and then you start to you start to i mean when when i say state of mind i shouldn’t have been doing this because it’s not a state of mind in your head it’s not an introspective state right it’s this indra it’s an existential state but when only when you get that state of being perhaps is better then you really see what he’s talking about like when you walk around the world and you get that right um and so i find reading his text although very challenging um i get the writers i really admire do that there’s the process of the text is as important as the content yeah yeah absolutely and it’s it’s a very winding process in yes nishitani here uh where you’re not always sure where he’s taking you uh and then you just kind of feel dropped off a cliff sometimes and then like two chapters later you realized you’re back where you were uh but in a different way now and uh yeah so i mean it’s it’s certainly a challenge but uh definitely a rewarding one uh the next step he takes uh after sort of what we’ve gone over at this point is integrating all this thinking like in motion like in time uh in this text and then he he closes up with a with a really uh this is probably the most challenging part of the text is his analysis of history at the end historicity yeah from like competing uh western christian and and post enlightenment perspectives nichi’s eternal recurrence and like buddhist more like universal time and and karma like he he throws so much uh into this and uh his the way he’s able to to end up with this idea of history that’s fully historical through its a historical eternal nature and vice versa yet again is yeah yeah yeah that’s uh i’m still still grappling with that one for sure yeah this stuff on historicity is really really difficult i mean there’s the sense you get this sense that in the movement i mean that what was the name of the book forms of transcendence uh the author starts with an s camp number the name and that author talks is doing sort of comparing heidegger to the mystical tradition of the neo-plutonic christian mystical tradition it talks about how like you can see history as this sort of movement of paradigms right these shifts um but that uh what can be disclosed in that is is well if you’ll allow me something eternal uh something that as you move between the paradigms there’s something disclosed that is the giver of paradigms which is not itself any paradigm or in any way paradigmatic and uh and that that is really and that reminds me a lot of heidegger’s notion of the being that’s not the being of beings but that which gives uh the being of the ends um so i it’s i agree that’s a difficult part of his work i try to understand the the analogy that works for me is is heidegger’s critique of ontotheology that we shouldn’t understand that the that which gives being to beings is not some sort of supreme being it’s not just a super powerful being it is something other than being but in no way in no way separable from being right it’s the emptiness and so i think what he’s trying to do there is also see that which gives history um is therefore not historical which gives history paradigmatically and not historical is like is like that it’s it’s it’s not a secret history it’s not a it’s not a secret author of history it’s it’s well it’s the non-history that makes history possible right and it’s not separable from history i thought that’s what he was trying to do and i thought that was important because we in the west have you know we have a very historic i think there’s a deep connection just as you can see the influence of heidegger and nichon or whatever i say there’s a deep connection between our ontotheology our understanding of god and our understanding of god as the author of history and that reality unfolds as a story as a history and nishitani is very powerfully i think and it’s very difficult text i grant you that but i think he’s trying to undermine those two things at the same time together yeah yeah absolutely i mean looking at the christian view the post enlightenment progress view and nichita or nicha’s uh they’re all will based uh yes yeah he’s of history and will is this self-enclosed self-centered concept and so uh he’s he’s trying to to get beyond that and he even analyzes a karma in the same way uh you know at least a parallel to this yeah in a really important aspect um but yeah it’s also important to to consider uh that this uh non-historical basis for history isn’t any kind of telos of history exactly i was about to i was about to say that because will and purpose and telos are bound together and the idea that yeah yeah that’s exactly right and even even individuals understanding the right the meaning as ultimately having as a purpose where the purpose is also understood as that towards which they will or that which the great will is willing for them right um yeah exactly it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s completely undermining of a teleological notion of history and god and notice how difficult that is for us to think in the west yeah how difficult that is for us to think what the heck would a non-teleological history and a non-teleological god of history what would that possibly mean yeah i i think somewhat like staying within that paradigm but still like respecting his thinking i feel like it almost has to to do with every historical event and occurrence being auto-telec in itself through all other things yeah yeah yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s like that it’s like you move to the holographic and this is what i get out of reading like platinus and proclus right you get and whitehead you get that sort of holographic sense of history and then what what you what you move to is you move off if you’ll allow me a metaphor you move off a horizontal understanding of history to a vertical understanding right um but it’s more spherical like it’s yeah yeah right right it’s that sense of no no what history is is one with the you know the disclosure of the interconnectedness the interpenetration of all things yeah ultimately it has to be something that that discloses both the genuine historicity and uniqueness and newness of events while also disclosing this universality yes yes and and those again are these self uh like reinforcing to each other uh and they they constitute each other’s being the universality and the genuinely historical in particular so yeah it’s it’s an incredibly deep view of history and i see how being able to to integrate those two aspects would be such a such a powerful shift in in so many domains of our thinking especially in traditional religious and scientific uh modes of thinking uh to be able to achieve that that that non-duality of these these two essential features of of history i think it’s central to his argument i mean um it’s not uh you know i think there’s a reason why that has to come at the end of religion and nothingness because i think he takes very seriously uh heidegger’s idea that the uh that metaphysics is the history right metaphysics is the history of nihilism right and only by by overcoming um that you know that aristotelian cartesian contian notion of metaphysics and uh and overcoming the way it’s bound to our self understanding self-interpretation can we actually overcome the nihilism that has resulted from it so i think although i agree with you that last part of the book is the most challenging but it is in an important sense very summative because that’s where he’s most putting pressure on our cultural cognitive grammar but where he feels like he’s deeply influenced by heidegger’s thesis right that this teleological substance-based way of thinking has really locked us into the inevitability of nihilism so he has to go there the demand if he’s going to really address nihilism especially the meaning crisis of nihilism right uh of the you know the historical advent of it right into dominance right then he’s got to do that uh but that does mean that the only way i think i think he’s correct on this he sees he can do that is by deeply challenging the cultural cognitive grammar we have around history substance being god yeah yeah and uh i mean with that i think we’ve pretty much gone through this this whole text uh uh in in in its most important themes here the only things we didn’t touch on were uh ideas of the personal and impersonal and the scientific mechanistic uh analysis that he he gets into which is very very heideggerian as well yeah very heideggerian but i think i think the heideggerian but i think i think we at least i mean and we were both very uh we’re both very deferential about you know you you can’t just pick up religion well maybe you can i couldn’t i could not just pick up religion and nothingness and i had quite sophisticated uh philosophical education and you know deep practice within buddhism and daoism and it was no it took it takes a lot of work and a lot of help from a lot of other people and so you know i i’m i’m i’m offering what we’ve we’ve done here together as basically which we’re trying to whet your appetite and introduce you uh to a thinker whose relevance to uh the the problem of nihilism and the meaning crisis is is world historically important and is profound um had as i’ve said and we’ve seen it repeatedly and this gave me a chance to say it’s had just a huge impact on me uh and and my thinking um and you know and he he for me is the great prophet in the way i use it in the meaning crisis in the biblical sense of he’s the great prophet he’s the great prophet of non-theism he’s he’s really trying to say you’ve got to break out of right that all those things we we’ve spent this whole time trying to break out like you and i of you know these sort of fundamental categories right um and break into something like non-theism in a profound way and so that’s what i mean when when i do the series on non-theism and reinventing the sacred in the face of nihilism he’s going to play a pivotal he’s going to play a starting role in that series because this is just such important and like and he just he also represents what we need we’ve got to get past the western and eastern you know approaches uh yeah we got to break past that and he for me is just a profound exemplar of how that’s possible for us of how in the face of pluralism one can get past kind of an easy perennialism or an easy relativism and nishatani he says look what can actually be done look what can actually be done yeah absolutely it’s it’s sophisticated the way he weaves buddhism and christianity and with each other and he’s he’s very clear that uh he’s not just like a buddhist based thinker just doing some comparative analysis or something he’s he’s finding the truth where it is and and bringing it together yeah he’s not an apologist for any he’s not a buddhist apologist he he’s not a heideggerian apologist he’s not a neoplatonic apologist no he’s doing like he he’s he’s he’s an epochal thinker and again he this is not sort of empty academic conceptualization this is life transformative stuff he’s talking about mm-hmm yeah very very immediately even in uh in just reading the text uh yeah very much being able to those those with ears to to to listen yeah yeah that’s for sure okay jared i think this is a good place to bring it to a close um perhaps we can talk again about this or some of the other figures um in the kyoto school but i think this was a good introduction i will probably want you to come back um and have another discussion with me when i’m doing that series on on the god beyond all gods and on and non-theism in the face of nihilism um so yeah that would that would be wonderful okay that’d be great yeah i would i would love to to sort of apply some of nishitani to to some of the the major themes you’ve been working with especially the the religion uh that’s not a religion i think he yeah he’s a star figure in that so nishitani and tillich and korban so at some point we want to talk about well like a possible discourse between korban and nishitani or you know korban and young on one side and perhaps nishitani and nishida on the other yeah that could that could be great i’m actually just starting uh this uh coming weekend a reading group on korban’s alone with the alone so i’ll i’ll i’ll be primed for for uh some comparative work pretty shortly here so okay that’s great okay thanks a lot jared yeah thank you pleasure really great pleasure