Religion and Nothingness

A major work of the Kyoto School by Nishitani Keiji, published in Japanese in 1961 as Shūkyō to wa nanika (What is religion?) and translated by Jan Van Bragt in 1982. It is made up of six long essays. Nishitani starts from the claim that religion becomes real when a person becomes a question to themselves, facing death, sin and meaninglessness. He argues that modern science and the Cartesian ego have driven Western culture into nihilism, and that thinkers such as Nietzsche and Sartre, who saw this most clearly, still stopped at a nothingness set against being. The way through, he claims, is the Buddhist standpoint of emptiness (śūnyatā), where the self and things appear in their suchness, each fully itself while interpenetrating with all others. Later chapters work out what this means for time, karma and history, in dialogue with Christianity, Meister Eckhart, Heidegger and Zen.

It is the most sustained attempt to answer European nihilism from a Buddhist standpoint, and it shows how Zen and Western philosophy can be read against each other rather than merely side by side.