The Prajñāpāramitā Logic of Soku-hi in Nishida Kitarō

By John W.M. Krummel

The connections between some of the major concepts in Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy and

those of Mahāyāna Buddhism have often been noted. Throughout the oeuvre of what is

called “Nishida philosophy,” from the late 1920s onward, we find plenty of motifs that

suggest Mahāhāyana origins although it is only in the late 1930s and 1940s that he makes

frequent reference to these sources. There is obviously a proximity between Nishida’s

conception of the nothingness of the absolute and its self-negation that he designated

absolute nothing (zettai mu) on the one hand, and the Mahāyāna notion of the emptiness

of emptiness on the other hand. As another very conspicuous example, we may mention

the concept of absolutely contradictory self-identity (zettai mujunteki jikodōitsu).

Therein one observes a theme also found in Mahāyāna Buddhism: its various

formulations of the non-duality between opposites on the basis of their non-substantiality.

Such ideas are traceable to the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, exemplified in the well-known

statement in The Heart Sūtra: “form is emptiness, emptiness as such is form.” The

collapsing of opposites in both treads a middle path that avoids the reification of being on

the one hand and its utter annihilation on the other hand. Nishida’s friend D.T. Suzuki

has characterized that mode of thinking that he traces to the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, as a

“logic of soku-hi.” Suzuki’s influence on Nishida in this regard is conspicuous in

Nishida’s final essay of 1945, Bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan (“The Logic of

Place and the Religious Worldview”), wherein he frequently refers to the “logic of soku-

hi” of the Prajñāpāramitās. In the following I would like to discuss the possible
connections between Nishida’s dialectical ideas and Suzuki’s logic of soku-hi in light of

the Mahāyāna doctrines, traceable to the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras.

The so-called “middle path” of Mahāyāna Buddhism, comprising a double

negation in its notion of the emptiness of emptiness is an attempt to avoid reduction to

conceptual opposites while acknowledging the simultaneity of opposites as bi-

conditionals rather than resolving them conceptually. The point of Mahāyāna practice is

to experience that emptiness. Contrasting Mahāyāna’s middle path with Hegel’s

sublational dialectic, Nishida’s dialectic, developed during the 1930s, is closer in intent to

Mahāyāna. He declares his dialectic of the concrete to be neither monism nor pluralism,

neither idealism nor materialism, neither teleology nor mechanism, neither universalism

nor individualism. He rejects both the Aristotelian reduction of reality to the individual

substance and the Platonist subordination of individuals under a universal idea. The

dialectical matrix is neither simply being nor utterly non-being. Each position in its own

is an abstraction from the inter-relational complexity of the concrete that Nishida seeks to

express. The positionless position of Mahāyāna likewise avoids the reductive extremes

of utter nothing in nihilism (uccheda) and of substantial being in eternalism (śāśvata).

Nishida’s self-contradictory identity, for example, then appears to be a direct descendent

of that Mahāyāna middle stance.

Having developed that dialectic of contradictory identity during the 1930s,

Nishida subsequently turns his attention more directly to his religious concerns in the

1940s. He comes to make explicit textual references to religious, especially Buddhist but

also Christian, sources. And on the basis of these references, we can see his dialectic of

contradictory identity, together with the newer formulation of inverse correspondence

(gyakutaiō), in a clearer Buddhistic light. For example, Nishida identifies what he had

been calling the contradictory self-identity between many and one to be the very logic

that has been operative behind “the religion of eastern nothing,” whereby “mind is

Buddha.” He makes the claim that through that absolutely contradictory self-identity of

the world as one and many, each individual self faces the absolute in the present. He

explains this in terms of the individual’s own self-contradiction. The religious

understanding that “mind is Buddha” entails that we penetrate this principle of “all is

one” by dying to the ego in the depths of self-contradiction. (Z8 421) With this stance

Nishida sees himself moving in a direction opposite to that of the object-logic, i.e., an

epistemological stance that focuses its attention upon the object as its subject of assertion.

He asserts that a truly absolute dialectic, i.e., a dialectic of contradictory identity, is

instead to be found in the Buddhist doctrine of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras that gives

expression to the intuitive wisdom (prajñā) of the emptiness of all. (Z10 317, 399)

Suzuki’s influence is evident here and Nishida approvingly quotes Suzuki’s explanation

of prajñā as a true self-awareness that is the discrimination of non-discrimination. (Z10

109) Nishida thus comes to detect a connection between his dialectic of contradictory

self-identity and the prajñā stance of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras that his friend Suzuki

calls the “logic of soku-hi” (sokuhi no ronri). In his final essay Nishida looks to that

literature of the Prajñāpāramitās and its so-called logic of soku-hi, to which we now turn.

We cannot ignore here the close relationship between Nishida and his friend from

his student days, the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. Mutai Risaku, who knew them both and

witnessed their friendship, noted that their intellectual exchange was one of mutual

influence in each other’s scholarships and that they held in common the view concerning
the contradictory nature of reality. While on the one hand Suzuki with his expertise on

Buddhism shaped Nishida’s understanding of that topic, it has also been suggested that

Nishida’s own philosophy in turn influenced Suzuki’s reading of Mahāyāna doctrines.

Suzuki had initially stressed the a-rational and experiential dimensions of Zen Buddhism.

But by the late 1930s, realizing the importance of its philosophical and doctrinal

dimensions, Suzuki came to emphasize — perhaps under the influence of Nishida’s logic

of contradictory self-identity — what he viewed to be the characteristic logical structure

found in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, especially The Diamond Sūtra. The logical structure

assumes the paradoxical form of equation via negation, which he formulates as “A is

non-A, therefore A is A.” This is the logical structure that Suzuki designates as “the

logic of soku-hi [is and is-not].” But just as Nishida’s logic may have been a catalyst that

formed Suzuki’s own reading of Mahāyāna doctrines, Nishida on his part repeatedly

received instructions from Suzuki as to the ideas, literature, and terminology of

Buddhism, and came to incorporate them into his own works. Mutai believes that

Nishida’s philosophy of religion in his final 1945 essay was influenced by his exposure to

Suzuki’s ideas from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. Through his intellectual exchanges

with Suzuki, Nishida was stimulated to pay more direct attention to the affinity of his

own thinking with Mahāyāna thought. In a 1938 lecture, for example, while claiming

that he did not directly derive his dialectical notion that “one is many and many is one”

from Buddhist doctrines per se, Nishida acknowledges a deep commensurability between

the two ways of thinking, his and Mahāyāna. (Z13 22) Having developed his dialectics

along his own philosophical path, Nishida in his later years came to feel that some deep

source common to both had been at work within his own thinking as well, irrespective of
whether he had intentionally or unintentionally drawn inspiration from Mahāyāna sources

in his earlier works. But in his final 1945 essay, Nishida himself, repeatedly makes use

of Suzuki’s reading of the Prajñāpāramitās in terms of a logic of soku-hi that Suzuki had

developed in his Nihonteki reisei (Japanese Spirituality). But if Suzuki’s logic had

influenced Nishida’s own view to contradictory self-identity, Nishida’s thought

concerning contradictory self-identity may earlier have influenced Suzuki’s reading of

those Buddhist scriptures. If Mutai’s observation is correct it appears that the exchange

of ideas between Suzuki and Nishida was truly reciprocal. But to make such reciprocity

possible in the first place there must have been something commensurable between

Nishida’s dialectic and Mahāyāna doctrines to begin with. In a letter to Suzuki (May 11,

1945), Nishida writes that he takes his own logic of absolutely contradictory self-identity

to be in one aspect the Prajñāpāramitā logic of soku-hi. He immediately adds however

that he thinks that something unique and distinct emerges in its determination as the

contradictory self-identity of one and many. (Z23 386) In any case, Nishida during the

1940s begins employing the term soku-hi in explicating his own notion of contradictory

self-identity.

By the 1940s we find Nishida fully incorporating the discourse of soku-hi logic

into his dialectical philosophy of religion. In elucidating his own concepts of basho vis-

à-vis nothing, contradictory identity, and inverse correspondence, Nishida appropriates

Suzuki’s logic of soku-hi while employing passages from Buddhist texts, especially the

Prajñāpāramitā sūtras. For example, after discussing the absolutely contradictory self-

identity between absolute and relative, between the absolute’s holistic oneness and the

manifold of individuals, between the absolute’s transcendence to and immanence in the

world, Nishida — in Bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan — refers to Suzuki’s reading

of The Diamond Sūtra as expressing the same paradox in soku-hi logical terms. He

quotes the famous passage from the Diamond Sūtra: “Because all dharmas are not all

dharmas, therefore they are called all dharmas. Because the Buddha is no Buddha, he is

the Buddha; Because sentient beings are not sentient beings, they are sentient beings.”

(Z10 316-17) The point of the Diamond Sūtra is that nothing, even the Buddha, exists in

virtue of itself; everything is what it is due to its relationship to what it is not. For

something to be what it is, it cannot just be what it is by itself.

Nishida takes that soku-hi logic and applies it to God to explain what he means by

“absolute.” An utterly transcendent God that is without any reference or relation to

anything else, as utterly independent in self-identity, is no true God. God cannot be

conceived in such terms as a substance. Just like the dharmas in the Diamond Sūtra are

dharmas in their emptiness, God must empty Himself in order to be God. The absolute

must contain self-negation whereby it inverts itself into the relative. The holistic one

maintains itself thus in the plurality of individuals. The creativity of the absolute is in the

affirmation of God’s absolute negation within. God’s self-identity as a true absolute is

not to be conceived in terms of object-logical substance. Instead it is mediated by

absolute negation in terms of the Prajñāpāramitā soku-hi logic. (Z10 333) Nishida’s

God then is a dialectical God who is both transcendent and immanent; an absolute that

maintains itself in absolutely contradictory self-identity, whereby the absolute “is

absolutely being because it is absolutely nothing; in absolute rest because it is in absolute

movement.” (Z10 335) And Nishida finds this dialectic to be best expressed by the

Prajñāpāramitā logic of soku-hi that “thoroughly penetrates such absolute dialectic” to

give full expression to absolutely contradictory self-identity. (Z10 317, 321; see also 335)

Nishida applies the same soku-hi formulation to the human self or mind that is in inverse

correspondence with God as well. In the previous year (1944), in order to explain his

own vision of self-awareness in terms of self-contradiction or self-negation in distinction

from the self-affirmative stance of the Cartesian cogito, Nishida quotes another passage

from that Diamond Sūtra: “Because all minds are not minds, they are called mind.” (Z10

109)

The two, man and God, finite and absolute, thus meet in the inverse

correspondence of their mutual self-negation so that they are in absolutely contradictory

self-identity. To show this, Nishida makes use of a Buddhist saying taken from Zen

master Myōchō (Daitō Kokushi): “Buddha and I, separate through a billion kalpas of

time, yet not separate for an instant; encountering each other the whole day through, yet

not encountering each other for an instant.” (Z10 104) Nishida seems to understand this

passage to mean that when one feels one’s separation from God or Buddha, at that

moment of utter despair, one in fact is in contact with God/Buddha; and in reverse that

when one feels confident that one is in contact with the absolute, one is infinitely

separated from it. It illustrates the inverse correspondence of mutual self-negation: one

meets God only in dying to one’s ego. Nishida returns to this passage several times in

order to exhibit the dialectic of religiosity. What makes such a dialectic possible,

according to Nishida, is not Aristotle’s substance logic but rather the Prajñāpāramitā

logic of soku-hi.

Within Indian Buddhist philosophy, the first important interpreter of that

paradoxical thought of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras was Nāgārjuna of the Madhyamaka

school. Scholars usually take this to be the commencement of systematic philosophy

within Mahāyāna. This Mādhyamika school further developed what Suzuki and Nishida

found in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras. We see, for example, a collapsing of opposites,

comparable to Nishida’s, in Nāgārjuna’s tetralemma (four-fold negation of is, is-not, both

is and is-not, and neither is nor is-not) and the concomitant theory of the two truths of the

relative or conventional (samvrti-satya) and the ultimate or absolute (paramārtha-satya).

The tetralemma is meant to disclose the provisional nature (samvrti) of all truth-claims

while simultaneously referring to an ultimate truth (paramārtha) in regard to their

emptiness, i.e., the absence of any essential independence. A statement, even if

provisionally true, is ultimately empty in virtue of its provisional nature. And yet

because emptiness signifies this very lack of ontological independence or ultimacy, it

itself does not point to anything separate and beyond the provisional: “…whatever is

dependently arisen, that is emptiness.” Both truths, provisional and ultimate, thus refer to

the same reality that things are conventionally real but substantially unreal. Hence

Nāgārjuna’s theory of two truths takes samsāra and nirvāņa to be not two distinct realms

but rather alternative perspectives to the same reality of empty phenomena, with neither

side possessing its “own-being” or “self-nature” (sva-bhāva). This is the Mādhyamika

standpoint of the middle way that collapses the distinction between opposites such as

being and nothing, or many and one, via their emptiness, without reifying or annihilating

either for the sake of the other. On the basis of emptiness, reality is “one yet many, many

yet one.” We find this non-dualistic collapsing of opposites developed in later Far

Eastern Mahāyāna as well, and this is precisely the standpoint that Nishida — whether

consciously or not — inherits in his view to reality as a contradictory self-identity, an

idea founded upon the same sort of de-substantialization of opposites. That is why some

commentators (like Masao Matsumoto) have suggested that Nishida’s own concept of

basho vis-à-vis nothing that negates mere affirmation and mere negation, being and non-

being, corresponds to, or may have taken a hint from, Mādhyamika thought. Nishida

himself, in Bashoteki ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan, alludes to this Mādhyamika logic. He

claims that Nāgārjuna’s “negative theology” and his “eightfold negations” (happu) — the

systematic denial of all reifying assertions: “neither ceasing nor arising, neither

annihilation nor permanence, neither identity nor difference, neither coming-in nor going-

out,” then further developed by the Chinese San-lun school —, along with its cardinal

teaching of the non-duality between nirvāņa and samsāra, exhibits a version of the

structure of soku-hi logic. (Z10 317)

In any case by the 1940s Nishida comes to view his own notion of basho as the

place wherein the logic of soku-hi operates, to unfold its characteristic dialectic that

shapes the world-matrix of co-originating or mutually dependent opposites. In general

then in the essays of the 1940s, dealing with religiosity and its dialectic, Nishida suggests

a deep inter-resonance between his own thought of absolutely contradictory self-identity

and Suzuki’s understanding of the Prajñāpāramitā logic of soku-hi. Seeing the two

“logics” — the dialectic of contradictory self-identity and soku-hi logic — side-by-side is

helpful in reminding us that the “identity” in “absolutely contradictory self-identity” is

always mediated by “absolute contradiction,” i.e., the relationship of mutual self-

negation, which in Buddhist terms means emptiness. This is no self-identity that affirms

self-substantiality. The whole qua absolute is no totalizing principle that erases or

dominates its other or its parts. A decade or so earlier in Ippansha no jikakuteki taikei
(The Sustem f Universals in Self-Awareness, 1929) Nishida had already expressed this

non-substantiality in reference to Buddhist scripture — rare for that time period —, by

citing the famous Prajñāpāramitā equation from the Heart Sūtra, “form is emptiness,

emptiness is form. (Z4 357) In that respect he already had some awareness, though

reticent about it, of the closeness of his thinking to Mahāyāna even prior to the influence

of Suzuki’s soku-hi logic in the late 1930s. During the mid-1930s Nishida develops that

non-substantial non-duality in a dialectical direction reminiscent of the Hua-yen doctrine

of the dharma realm of the mutual non-obstruction between thing-events and their

patterning (li-shi wu-ai; riji muge) and amongst thing-events themselves (shih-shih wu-ai;

jiji muge). It is that dialectics of non-substantiality that becomes explicated in the 1940s

in terms of soku-hi logic with explicit reference to the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras.

In closing my presentation, however, I want to add here a caveat. We need to

exercise caution so as not to simply reduce the uniqueness and complexity of Nishida’s

thinking, categorizing it, as nothing but Buddhist or Mahāyāna thought. His

philosophizing sought to overcome certain issues, most notably the issue of dualism

raised in the works of western philosophers and his response to them was accordingly

articulated in the language of western philosophy. In this, Nishida saw himself as

engaging in a nonsectarian philosophical search for truth. We also need to recognize the

uniqueness of his dialectical thought when viewed in light of the history of Buddhist

thought, e.g., in his understanding of the unfolding of history and the active role of

humanity therein, and even his notion of basho. Such ideas go beyond traditional

Buddhist formulations.