Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani; Jan van Bragt

Review by: Thomas P. Kasulis

The Journal of Religion, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), pp. 436-438
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Journal of Religion

"supernaturals"-as social scientists, estranged from both Western and Indian

religiosity, have persuaded Bowden to do. Classifying these gods as "naturals"
would be equally meaningful and correct.
These comments, offered by an overly earthbound reviewer, are criticisms
only in a very limited sense; they are intended as hints of caution and good
wishes for the future. Bowden's book is an excellent new beginning for all
historians of American religion. Those who presently ponder the necessity of
admitting pre-Christian religions into the realm of their discipline will be
forever indebted to the author's courageous pioneering work.
KARLW. LUCKERT, SouthwestMissouri State University.

NISHITANI,KEIJI. Religion and Nothingness. Translated with an introduction by

JAN VAN BRAGT;foreword by WINSTONL. KING. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982. xlix + 317 pp. $28.50.

Philosophers of religion and philosophical theologians can no longer be

parochial. The world of spirituality is pluralistic: some religions are theistic,
but others not; some are universalistic, whereas others are ethnic; some are
Semitic in origin, but others have their roots elsewhere. The reality of this
pluralism is known to every child who watches television reruns of KungFu
and to every adult who has read such best-sellersas ZenandtheArtof Motorcycle
Maintenance or Shogun.Hence, the student in the classroom and the reader in
the bookstore are as likely to be interested in karma as kerygma, in satori as
salvation.
In writing within this pluralistic context, philosophers cannot (or at least
should not) be content to dust off and recycle the old critiques of theodicy, the
ontological argument, or predestination. Those are distinctlyJwdeo-Christian
problems and, by extension, problems for other theistic traditions. Pluralism
demands, however, that we ask general questions transcending particularhis-
tories, particularrituals, and particularscriptures. What is religion, and what
does it mean for today's world? These are the questions motivating this
pioneering and thought-provokingbook by Keiji Nishitani, Japan's foremost
living philosopher of religion.
The cutting edge of this book for the typical Western reader is that Nishitani
is neither a Westerner nor a Christian. He is a Japanese Buddhist, in partic-
ular, a Zen Buddhist. Yet he is completely conversant with Western thought
and the Christian experience. When he looks out at the religions of the world,
therefore, he sees the same range of traditions we do, but he views them from,
as it were, a different mountain peak. Whenever any of us analyze diverse
phenomena beyond our personal experience, we naturally draw on, and
extrapolate from, what we know. Consequently, when Western philosophers
seek the common element in all religions, we tend to focus on a key idea in our
own tradition and expand its semantic and symbolic range so that it can
include the foreign. For this reason, Western analyses of world religion tend to
spin off from some particularly open-textured Judeo-Christian or Western
philosophical term such as "the ground of being," the numinous," "faith,"or
"ultimate concern." There is no ready alternative to this approach since we
cannot, after all, see the whole except from where we stand. And we cannot

436

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 Book Reviews

stand everywhere at once. Consequently, we have grown accustomed to

viewing world religion from a perspective arising out of our own religion.
An exciting aspect of this book is that Nishitani surveys religious experience
from the peak of his own spiritual tradition. His core vocabulary for mapping
the range of religious phenomena is, therefore, neither Western nor Judeo-
Christian, but Eastern and Buddhist. In particular, he speaks the Mahayana
Buddhist vocabulary of "nothingness"and suinyata.He considers Christianity,
consequently, in a knowledgeable, sensitive, and objective way, but from the
standpoint of a spiritual and philosophical pilgrim who has walked the path of
a differentmountain. He knows what it means to follow a path, but he has not
taken our path so he must inevitably generalize about Christianity in a way we
do not, indeed, cannot. For this reason, Nishitani's treatment of Christianity
may at times seem rarefiedto those who live on that mountain. The crucified
and resurrected Christ, the spiritual community of the Church, sacramental
grace, and the concept of Scripture as revelation are all dimensions of the
Christian experience somewhat peripheral to his concerns. From his distant
pinnacle, however, he can often see a pattern in our experience not readily
visible to us. He can even suggest new trails for us to blaze, trails reconnecting
stretches of our own mountain path that have been eroded or blocked over the
centuries. Nishitani writes, for example: "Christianitycannot, and must not,
look on modern atheism merely as something to be eliminated. It must instead
accept atheism as a mediation to a new development in Christianity itself"
(pp. 36-37). Realizing that Nishitani wrote those words in 1954 before the
Death of God movement and its "Christianatheism," we can appreciate the
value of having an observer chart our progress from afar. More important,
using the Buddhist vision of nothingness as a cue, he shows how traditional
concepts like kenosisand creatioex nihilocan point the way beyond nihilism and
atheism to a renewed vision of the divine.
As already noted, though, Nishitani's observations about Christianity are
primarily within his broader discussion of modern religious experience, a dis-
cussion in which he derives most inspiration from the technical terms of his
own tradition: anatman(non-ego), taigi (the great doubt), samadhi(settling [in
meditation]), nyojitsu(suchness), and so on. As a key to this terminology, Jan
Van Bragt, the translator, includes at the end of the book a very helpful and
insightful glossary. With the aid of this tool, the reader can follow Nishitani's
analysis through three separate, but interrelated, topics: Christianity (seen
from across the divide), Buddhism (seen from within), and religious experi-
ence in general (as the range within which those two religions are individual
peaks).
It is perhaps clear by now that Nishitani's concern with religion bridges
what the West calls the philosophy of religion and theology. Like the former,
Nishitani inquires into the nature of religious experience itself, without being
limited to any single tradition. The basis of his inquiry is not a simplistic
comparison of features, but a penetrating analysis of the existential structure
of human experience in the modern world and its capacity to assume religious
significance. On the other hand, Nishitani's analysis, like much of Western
theology, has an explicitly prescriptive, personal, and normative theme. He
says one must find "explanations that carry conviction for oneself as a con-
temporary individual, and in that sense of directing one's attention to what
oughtto berather than simply what hasbeen"(p. xlix). For Nishitani, religion is

437

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The Journal of Religion

not merely a human phenomenon; it is, rather, the phenomenon of being fully
human. Religion is understood to be the deepest form of self-inquiry.
As the sensitive and accurate translation of Van Bragt reveals so well,
Nishitani's style of thought and presentation derives from his two main
mentors, Martin Heidegger and Kitar6 Nishida. As might be expected of a
Heideggerian, Nishitani's analysis of religion emerges out of a Daseinanalysis
of human existence, that is, out of an existential anthropology. To the
Western theologian groomed on such thinkers as Rudolph Bultmann, Karl
Rahner, or Paul Tillich, for example, Nishitani's analysis has, at first a com-
fortable familiarity. The radical foreignness of Nishitani's position becomes
evident soon enough, however. Nishitani's initial questions are recognizably
Heideggerian, but his answers end up being somehow Japanese or Buddhist:
the individualism of Heidegger's Daseingives way to an analysis of the primacy
of the interpersonal;the nihilistic implications of nothingness blossom into the
ontological richness of the Buddhist notion of emptiness; the self defined
by Heideggerian projects is supersededby the primordialnon-ego experienced
in religious praxis. In short, Nishitani transforms some of existentialism's
great negations into Buddhist or, more generally, religious affirmations.In so
doing, Nishitani reveals unmistakably his membership in the Kyoto School of
philosophy and religion founded by Kitar6 Nishida.
The Kyoto School's hallmark is its profoundly new ways of discussing
knowledge, action, and ontology. In his introduction, Van Bragt pithily
summarizes the central notions of basho(place) and the logic of soku (here
translated as the Latin sive). For further background on the development and
assumptions of this school as well as a discussion of works available in English,
the interested reader can refer to my review article "The Kyoto School and the
West" (EasternBuddhist,vol. 15 [Autumn, 1982]). Nishitani's book is an
excellent example of the provocative thinking taking place in Japan today. His
reformulation of Nishida's categories in terms of a vocabulary and style more
suitable to dialogue with the West is a philosophical accomplishment of the
first magnitude. Any scholar or philosophical reader will undoubtedly find
many specific points with which to take issue, but in the final analysis, the level
of cross-culturalunderstanding and brilliance of analysis is light years beyond
almost any other book in the field. Indeed, it has taken three decades for that
brilliance to make its way into our English-speaking world. The Western
philosophical and theological world owes a debt of gratitude to the Nanzan
Institute, and to Professor Van Bragt in particular, for making this work
available to the wider audience it deserves.
THOMAS P. KASULIS, Northland College.

HOLDEN,PAT, ed. Women'sReligious Experience.Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble

Books, 1983. 205 pp. $26.50.
Materials on the everyday religious practicesand experience of women remain
rare: hence additions to the literature are always welcome. This small collec-
tion of studies, product of a seminar held at Oxford University during 1980, is
no exception. Nevertheless, it suffers from the defects common to its genre:

438

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